Climate Change Impacts on Plant Health and Food Security

Climate change poses a multifaceted threat to plant health and global food security by altering pathogen dynamics, stress resilience and crop yield stability. Rising temperatures, erratic precipitation and elevated greenhouse gases shift the incidence, distribution and severity of diseases caused by fungi, bacteria and viruses. These environmental changes disrupt plant physiology, weaken defences and foster the emergence of novel or resistant pathogen strains. At the same time, stress interactions—between drought, heat and disease—compound yield losses and challenge existing management strategies. Research advances now integrate molecular diagnostics, plant breeding for broad-spectrum resistance and systems modelling to anticipate disease outbreaks and optimise adaptive interventions, ensuring sustainable food production under a changing climate.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have introduced portable molecular assays that enable rapid detection of crop pathogens in field settings, harnessing colourimetric paper sensors combined with toehold-mediated strand displacement and smartphone analysis for multiplexed identification of fungal RNA. This approach allows early detection of fungicide-resistant mutants and guides precision application of agrochemicals to improve yield resilience under variable climatic conditions. Another investigation has characterised mono-alkyl lipophilic cations that inhibit oxidative phosphorylation in major fungal pathogens and trigger reactive oxygen species production to induce fungal apoptosis while activating innate plant defences. These compounds demonstrate efficacy against cereal diseases such as Septoria tritici blotch and rice blast, offering low-toxicity alternatives to conventional fungicides and countering resistance development in warming environments.

Climate Change Impacts on Plant Health and Food Security publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in climate change impacts on plant health and food security across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Abiotic stress: Non-living environmental factors such as temperature extremes, drought or elevated CO₂ that affect plant physiology.

Biotroph/necrotroph: Pathogens that extract nutrients from living tissue (biotroph) or kill host tissue before feeding (necrotroph).

Fungicide resistance: Genetic adaptations in fungal populations that reduce sensitivity to chemical control agents.

Molecular diagnostics: Techniques for detecting pathogen genetic material to identify disease presence and variants rapidly.

References

1. Precise in-field molecular diagnostics of crop diseases by smartphone-based mutation-resolved pathogenic RNA analysis. Nature Communications (2023).
2. A lipophilic cation protects crops against fungal pathogens by multiple modes of action. Nature Communications (2020).
3. Integrated crop-disease models: New frontiers in systems thinking. Farming System (2023).
4. Fusarium Fungi Pathogens, Identification, Adverse Effects, Disease Management, and Global Food Security: A Review of the Latest Research. Agriculture (2023).
5. Climate change and disease in plant communities. PLOS Biology (2020).