Latest news with #AndrewHultgren
10 hours ago
- Business
What farmers' adaptation to climate change means for the future of food
Think food prices are high now? By the end of this century, climate change could significantly cut production of six staple food crops around the world — including wheat production in Canada, leading to higher prices, a new study finds. And certain crops in higher-income regions, such as corn and wheat in the U.S. Midwest and wheat in Canada's Prairies, could see some of the bigger losses compared to crops in developing countries, projects the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature (new window) . Better-off parts of the world end up getting harmed in ways that are surprising that I didn't expect, said lead author Andrew Hultgren, an assistant professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne. But farmers' adaptation will make a difference. Meanwhile, Canada does have some options and may fare better than other parts of the world. The study looked at data about regional climates; climate impacts on specific crops; access to resources such as fertilizer and insurance and costs and benefits of different farming practices for farmers in 54 countries that grow corn, soybeans, rice, wheat, cassava and sorghum. The goal was to find out how farmers are adapting to weather shocks and the extent to which adaptation is offsetting the impacts of climate change. In a high-emissions scenario, where global temperatures warm by 3.2 to 5.4 C by 2090 (new window) , corn production is expected to decline up to 40 per cent in the U.S., eastern China, central Asia, southern Africa and the Middle East; and wheat production is expected to fall 30 to 40 per cent in China, Russia, the U.S. and Canada. Enlarge image (new window) Maps show average yield losses for different crops in a high-emissions scenario with adaptation. Photo: Nature 2025 / Hultgren et al. Adaptation makes some difference Some of the losses in developing countries will be offset by growing wealth in those countries that allows them to mechanize to increase productivity. Adaptation strategies, such as growing different varieties and adjusting fertilizer use and irrigation, can also help, offsetting about one-third of global agricultural losses. That's good, Hultgren said. But it's not everything. But even with adaptation, the study projected a 25 per cent productivity loss globally by 2100 among the six crops it looked at. The United Nations projects that we're on track to warm as much as 2.9 C by the end of the century (new window) — less than the high emissions scenario. Hultgren said even with warming of only 3 C, global production would be lowered by the amount of calories that people eat for breakfast every day. Enlarge image (new window) This graph from the study shows how the availability of food calories will be affected with a rise in global mean surface temperature. Photo: Nature 2025 / Hultgren et al. That could lead to higher prices in higher-income countries, and social and political instability in poorer countries, where many people could have trouble affording food. These results indicate a scale of innovation, cropland expansion or further adaptation that might be necessary to ensure food security in a changing climate, the study concludes. More harm in higher-income countries? Hultgren and his research team found that while losses in low-income regions were substantial, they were bigger in productive farming areas in higher-income areas such as the U.S., Canada and western Europe. That's because many poorer countries have already done much more adaptation, Hultgren said — they're already facing more extreme heat and don't have access to resources such as insurance, requiring them to be more risk averse. WATCH | India tries to adapt to the threat of extreme heat : Début du widget Widget. Passer le widget ? Fin du widget Widget. Retourner au début du widget ? Gurcharn Brar, the principal investigator of the Cereal Breeding Lab at the University of Alberta, grew up in the wheat-growing Punjab region of India. He said his parents tell him it used to have cooler winters necessary for good yields. But now the winter is shorter and wheat may be exposed to extreme heat while flowering. That may prevent it from producing seeds or cause it to produce smaller seeds. Climate change is already affecting yields in that part of India, he said. I think we do not realize it as much… we still have cooler summers. While the lower level of adaptation means higher-income countries have lots of room to adapt, Hultgren notes that adaptation is costly. For example, more varieties that flower earlier in the season before extreme heat hits may have lower yields. Adaptation, crop switching happening in Canada Brar is developing new wheat varieties for commercial cultivation in northern parts of the Prairies, known as the Parkland region. He said Canada still has cooler summers, but wheat here has already been affected by more frequent droughts, since the crop mostly relies on rain rather than irrigation. He said some losses in Canada have already been offset by growing improved, higher yielding wheat varieties — although they would be seeing bigger gains in yield without climate change. We know that varieties that will be grown 10 years from now…should stand drought and heat better, he said. Researchers are already developing them, as it takes eight to 12 years. Developing a new variety also costs about $1 million on average, he said. Enlarge image (new window) The Reid family harvests their wheat crop near Cremona, Alta., on Sept. 19, 2023. Photo: The Canadian Press / Jeff McIntosh Gunter Jochum runs Blue Diamond Farms west of Winnipeg and is growing wheat, oats, canola and soybeans on 2,550 hectares with his brother-in-law. He's been farming the region for 40 years and is also the president of the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association. Jochum said he and other farmers are constantly improving their farming practices, technology, and changing their crops and varieties to suit changing conditions in the climate and the market. Despite challenging swings between wet and dry conditions in recent decades, he said, our yields still seem to be able to go up every year because of the way we change farming — the way we adapt to the climate, to the changes. In Canada's case, the study shows that while wheat yields may decline in some areas, they could increase for crops such as corn and soybeans in more northern areas. WATCH | Tool crunches weather data to help grain producers avoid costly disease: Début du widget Widget. Passer le widget ? Fin du widget Widget. Retourner au début du widget ? Jochum said that's already happening in his region. Until 2000, no one thought to grow soybeans there because it was too cold, but in the last 20 years, they've become a really important crop on our farm, in our area. That's partly because a warming climate has extended the growing season slightly and partly because scientists have developed faster-growing varieties. In the last five years, corn has really taken off in southern Manitoba, he added. While he sees bigger risks and issues closer to the equator, he thinks Canadian farmers are well-placed to adapt to the changing climate if they have the right support. His group is pushing for more government investment in new varieties of crops and policies that encourage the private sector to develop new varieties. Emily Chung (new window) · CBC News · Science, Climate, Environment Reporter Emily Chung covers science, the environment and climate for CBC News. She has previously worked as a digital journalist for CBC Ottawa and as an occasional producer at CBC's Quirks & Quarks. She has a PhD in chemistry from the University of British Columbia. In 2019, she was part of the team that won a Digital Publishing Award for best newsletter for What on Earth. You can email story ideas to Subscribe to the What on Earth newsletter (new window)
Fast Company
10 hours ago
- Science
- Fast Company
Climate crisis could wipe out half of U.S. crops by 2100, scientists warn
A major new study published in Nature examines how rising temperatures will impact global food systems, and the results offer a dire warning for wealthy countries. As the planet warms, the environments that grow the most-consumed crops around the globe are changing, but there's been a lot of disagreement about what those changes will look like. Counter to some more optimistic previous findings, the new study finds that every degree Celsius that the planet warms could result in 120 calories worth of food production lost per person, per day. The new analysis is the result of almost a decade of work by the Climate Impact Lab, a consortium of climate, agriculture and policy experts. The research brings together data from more than 12,000 regions in 55 countries, with a focus on wheat, corn, soybeans, rice, barley and cassava – the core crops that account for two-thirds of calories consumed globally. 'When global production falls, consumers are hurt because prices go up and it gets harder to access food and feed our families,' Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability Professor Solomon Hsiang, a senior author on the study, said in an announcement paired with the new paper. 'If the climate warms by 3 degrees, that's basically like everyone on the planet giving up breakfast.' Adaptation won't offset farming losses Some previous research has hinted that global food production could actually go up in a warming planet by lengthening growing seasons and widening the viable regions where some crops can grow. In Western American states like Washington and California, growing seasons are already substantially longer than they once were, adding an average of 2.2 days per decade since 1895. The new study criticizes previous research for failing to realistically estimate how farmers will adapt to a changing climate. While prior studies rely on an all-or-nothing model for agricultural climate adaptation where farmers either adapted flawlessly or didn't adapt at all, the new paper in Nature 'systematically measure[s] how much farmers adjust to changing conditions,' a first according to the research group. That analysis found that farmers who do adapt by switching to new crops or changing long-standing planting and harvesting practices could lessen a third of climate-caused losses in crop yields by 2100. But even in a best-case scenario of climate adaptation, food production is on track to take a major hit. 'Any level of warming, even when accounting for adaptation, results in global output losses from agriculture,' lead author and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Assistant Professor of agricultural and consumer economics Andrew Hultgren said. While wealthy countries are insulated from some of the deadliest ravages of the climate crisis, the new analysis reveals a U.S. food supply that is particularly vulnerable. Researchers found that the 'modern breadbaskets' that haven't yet explored climate adaptations will fare worse than parts of the world where extreme heat and changing weather has already forced farmers to adapt. 'Places in the Midwest that are really well suited for present day corn and soybean production just get hammered under a high warming future,' Hultgren said. 'You do start to wonder if the Corn Belt is going to be the Corn Belt in the future.' In a high-emissions model of the future where humans fail to meaningfully slow the march of global warming, corn production would dive by 40% in the U.S. grain belt, with soybeans suffering an even worse 50% decline. Wheat production would decline 30 to 40% in the same scenario. 'Because such a large fraction of agricultural production is concentrated in these wealthy-but-low-adaption regions, they dominate projections of global calorie production, generating much of the global food security risk we document,' the authors wrote, adding that farming in the U.S. is 'optimized for high average yields' in current climate conditions but is not robust enough to withstand a changing climate. 'This is basically like sending our agricultural profits overseas. We will be sending benefits to producers in Canada, Russia, China. Those are the winners, and we in the U.S. are the losers,' Hsiang said. 'The longer we wait to reduce emissions, the more money we lose.'
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Climate change cuts crop yields, even with adaptation efforts: Study
Climate-induced warming is jeopardizing the global food supply even as farmers take adaptive measures to stymie these effects, scientists are warning. In contrast with previous research suggesting warming actually could bolster food production, a new study, published in Nature on Wednesday, finds the opposite. For every additional degree Celsius the planet warms, its ability to produce food could decrease by 120 calories per person per day, or 4.4 percent of the current daily consumption, according to the study. 'If the climate warms by 3 degrees, that's basically like everyone on the planet giving up breakfast,' said senior author Solomon Hsiang, a professor of environmental social sciences at Stanford University, in a statement. Another serious side effect, Hsiang warned, could be price surges that infringe upon access to food for families across the world. U.S. agriculture is expected to suffer significant losses, particularly in the Midwest, the researchers noted. Lead author Andrew Hultgren, an assistant professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, warned that U.S. corn and soybean production could 'just get hammered under a high warming future.' 'You do start to wonder if the Corn Belt is going to be the Corn Belt in the future,' Hultgren said in a statement. Hsiang and Hultgren, together with more than a dozen scholars, worked over the past eight years to draw observations from more than 12,000 regions across 55 countries. They analyzed adaptation costs and yield for crops responsible for two-thirds of the planet's calories: wheat, rice, soybeans, barley and cassava. They found that previous studies failed to consider what adaptation measures might be realistic for farmers — assuming they would implement either 'perfect' adaptation protocols or none at all. The researchers estimated that adjustments farmers are making — such as switching crops, shifting planting and harvesting dates and altering fertilizer — could offset about a third of climate-related losses in 2100 amid rising emissions. But the rest of the losses, they stressed, would remain. 'Any level of warming, even when accounting for adaptation, results in global output losses from agriculture,' Hultgren said. Overall, the researchers found that yield losses could amount to about 41 percent in the wealthiest regions and 28 percent in the lowest income areas by 2100. There is a 50 percent chance that the world's rice yields could rise, because rice thrives on warm nights, while there is a 70 percent to 90 percent chance that the other staple crops will decline, according to the study. In the shorter-term, the authors estimated that climate change would bring down global crop production by about 8 percent by 2050, regardless of the rise or fall of emissions. This is because carbon dioxide emissions, they explained, stay in the atmosphere, trapping heat for the long haul. Going forward, the scientists said they are working with the United Nations Development Program to raise awareness about their findings among governments. They are also creating a system to determine which communities are most at risk of declines and could benefit from targeted support. 'Farmers know how to maintain the soil, invest in infrastructure, repair the barn,' Hsiang said. 'But if you're letting the climate depreciate, the rest of it is a waste. The land you leave to your kids will be good for something, but not for farming.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Climate crisis could hit yields of key crops even if farmers adapt, study finds
Some of our critical staple crops could suffer 'substantial' production losses due to climate breakdown, a study has found, even if farmers adapt to worsening weather. Maize, soy, rice, wheat, cassava and sorghum yields are projected to fall by as much as 120 calories per person per day for every 1C the planet heats up, according to new research in Nature, with average daily losses that could add up to the equivalent of not having breakfast. The study found rising incomes and changes in farming practices could stem the losses by about a quarter by 2050 and by one-third by 2100 – though they would not stop them entirely. Related: European and British soils seriously degraded by intensive farming 'In a high-warming future, we're still seeing caloric productivity losses in the order of 25% at global scale,' said Andrew Hultgren, an environmental economist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and lead author of the study. 'It's not as bad as a future where adaptation doesn't happen at all, but it's not this rosy 'agriculture is going to benefit from climate change' kind of picture.' Farmers are among those hardest-hit by extreme weather events, but scientists have struggled to quantify what climate breakdown will do to food production. A major source of uncertainty is the extent to which farmers will adapt to hotter temperatures by changing which crops they use, when they plant and harvest them, and how they grow them. The team of researchers from the US and China used data from 12,658 regions in 54 countries to capture the extent to which food producers have adapted to different changes in the climate. They applied these historical relations to models simulating future crop production as temperatures rise and economies grow, and compared the losses with a hypothetical world in which global heating stopped in the early 2000s. In an extreme heating scenario, the study found, the relative yield for a crop such as soy would fall by 26% by 2100, even after accounting for adaptation, rising incomes and the effect of plants growing faster due to extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A more realistic heating scenario – closer to the level that current policies will cause – would lead to yield losses of 16% for soy, 7.7% for wheat and 8.3% for corn, the study found. Rice was the only one of the six crops the researchers studied whose yields would rise because of climate change, with an expected gain of 4.9%. The global population is projected to rise from about 8 billion today to 10 billion by the end of the century, increasing demand for food as carbon pollution warps weather patterns. The researchers found the greatest losses would hit modern-day 'bread basket' regions with highly productive lands, but added that people in poorer countries would be among the ones least able to afford food. 'In a lot of climate impact studies, the global poor get hurt, and that's true here too,' said Hultgren. 'What is different from a lot of the previous work out there is that relatively rich, well-to-do portions of the world that are bread baskets are actually hit the hardest.' The research, which uses econometric methods to gauge the total effect of adapting, contrasts with previous studies that explicitly model biophysical interactions. A study in Nature Communications in 2022 using the latter approach found timely adaptation of growing periods would increase actual crop yields by 12%. Jonas Jägermeyr, a researcher at Columbia Climate School and co-author of the study, said the new research did not cover adaptation options that are not implemented today and that its results were likely to be pessimistic. 'Empirical impact studies are known to be overly pessimistic when it comes to far-into-the-future scenarios,' he said. 'Process-based models show the importance of plant growth interactions that cannot be empirically trained on historical data.' But such models have also been criticised for exploring what is theoretically possible without reflecting real-world constraints, such as market failures, human error and the availability of funds. 'The findings [of the new study] are reasonable but represent one end of a legitimate scientific debate,' said Ehsan Eyshi Rezaei, a crop scientist at the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research. He added: 'I view these results as a valuable empirical reality check showing we cannot assume perfect adaptation will save us – even if the truth likely lies between their pessimistic projections and [other researchers'] optimistic ones.'
The Hill
11 hours ago
- Science
- The Hill
Trump cuts to NOAA, NASA ‘blinding' farmers to risks, scientists warn
Trump administration cuts to climate research and federal weather forecasting agencies are blinding the U.S. to oncoming threats to its food supply — and kneecapping efforts to protect it. As Congress debates its own research and forecasting cuts, a study published in Nature on Wednesday suggests that fossil fuel-driven climate change poses an existential threat to key parts of the American food supply. Heat waves and drought driven by fossil fuel burning could mean a collapse of Midwestern corn and soy yields later this century, said study coauthor Andrew Hultgren of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The region, Hultgren noted, is both one of the world's richest breadbaskets — and one of its most endangered. When temperatures routinely exceed 100-plus degrees Fahrenheit, he told The Hill, 'It starts to become a question of how tenable it is to keep farming corn.' 'You do start to wonder if the Corn Belt is going to be the Corn Belt in the future,' he said. Proper forecasting and adaptation could cut those crop failures almost in half, the study found. But those corrective measures are under direct attack from President Trump's mass staff reductions at federal agencies concerned with tracking weather and climate, and the freezing of grants to any program or study that mentions climate. The effect on U.S. forecasting will be 'like losing your eyesight: slow and torturous,' said Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric sciences at University of Wisconsin. Americans who have grown up amid the 'unheralded revolution' of ever-more-precise weather forecasts will find themselves in a world growing blurrier — even as the weather grows ever more volatile, Martin added. Farmers choosing what crops to plant each season are effectively betting on the heat and rain, which determines what will survive to market — a prediction that is both harder and more vital in an era of weather whiplash, where early-season heat waves can ripen crops only for late-season ice storms to kill them. Those seasonal predictions rest on a vast, taxpayer-funded observation system that connects land, air and sea — and which current budget proposals seek to scale back or eliminate. Trump has sought, for example, to end a wide array of NASA programs that monitor changes to the atmosphere, oceans and land; eradicate the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) office that serves as the 'nerve center' of federal climate research; and cut by two-thirds the funding of the National Science Foundation. Many of those cuts appear to be replicated in the House and Senate budget proposals, which excise billions of federal dollars — and in particular target what Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called 'climate change and environmental funding at NOAA.' This policy is based on an 'ideological' foundation, said Christopher Sellers, an environmental historian at Stony Brook University. The administration, he said, is convinced that 'climate change isn't that real or alarming, and that climate alarmism — a species of 'wokeism' — is itself the bigger problem.' In addition to Wednesday's Nature study on the oncoming corn crisis, which drew on NASA research, federal agencies have previously funded or provided data to studies that sought to create new tools to help farmers navigate a more uncertain future. That included federally supported studies that modeled future declines in the ability to grow cotton in the Texas High Plains; investigations into how quickly the groundwater that feeds California agriculture can recover after drought; and projections that sought to forecast Midwestern floods a season ahead based on changes in the salt content of the ocean. That last study depends on 'good knowledge of the ocean state a season ahead,' said lead author Laifang Li of Pennsylvania State University — which itself depends on NASA salinity-sensing satellites that are kept calibrated by the NOAA-funded ARGO network, a web of 4,000 floating ocean buoys that monitor the salt and temperature of the ocean. Both the satellites and buoys are at risk under the president's budget, threatening weather forecasts for the whole U.S. — and particularly the vital farm country of the Midwest and California. Cuts to primary research and forecasting are exacerbated by cuts to the public-facing documents that make use of them and the farm adaptation programs the federal government funds — or used to. In April, the president canceled the National Climate Assessment, which distilled research like Hultgren's or Li's into actionable insights that federal and local extension agents transmitted to farmers. It also — in defiance of a court order — froze billions in conservation funding that had already been awarded to farmers and ranchers to help prepare their lands to help resist heat, flood and drought. Even if key Earth-monitoring programs survive, they will do so in an environment where staffing is dramatically reduced and where the executive branch is openly hostile to climate research. The Trump administration is currently aiming to cut NASA's budget by 25 percent, or more than 5,000 people, which adds to cuts earlier this year of 7 percent of NOAA and 10 percent of the NSF. The don't-say-climate campaign goes beyond weather or agriculture. In the last five months, the administration has blocked the Department of Defense from considering the security risks posed by a heating world; kept the Center for Disease Control from modeling the northward march of tropical diseases; and yanked back funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency aimed at making flood- and storm-prone communities less prone to disaster. But cuts at NOAA pose an immediate threat because of their impact on agriculture, said John Sokich, former head of congressional affairs at the National Weather Service. With the proposed cuts, 'we're not going to be able to understand what's happening, much less predict what's happening.' In addition to giving farmers insight on what to plant, seasonal forecasting built on the NOAA and NASA networks tells Western dam managers how much water to release downstream. It also warns when low rivers could raise shipping costs. And beyond the seasonal forecasts, federally funded climate data and forecasting forms an essential element in the long-term decisions farmers make about how to use their land, said John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist and a professor at Texas A&M University. Farmers know the climate is changing, Nielsen-Gammon said, 'and they're trying to adapt.' But programs like the now-defunct National Climate Assessment, he said, had been essential to letting them know which changes are 'natural variability, which ones are going to accelerate? Do we need to put in a new irrigation system — or is the water going to run out anyway?' Hultgren told The Hill that he had expected to find that the U.S., like other wealthy countries, offered farmers a relative harbor from global heating. 'I thought, oh, the corn belt farmers are going to be fully protected, right? They can make all the investments they need to make to mitigate these losses.' But the cost of those investments, and the sheer toll of extreme heat pushing ever earlier into the season, meant that 'the people who have the most to lose are going to lose the most.' Hultgren is 'cautiously hopeful,' he said: He thinks that studies like his, which show how 'climate change coming home to roost in these more developed economies like the US,' will help drive action to both slow it and adapt to it. The long backlog to academic research — this study was in the works for nine years — means that such findings will continue to come out throughout Trump's second term. But if proposed cuts go through, the research pipeline that would provide the actionable insights of the 2030s risks getting cut off. 'Nature is pushing back on us,' Hultgren said. The nation risks 'blinding our eyes' to the information that would let it push back.
