Every additional degree Celsius of global surface temperature rise on average will lead to a decline of 120 calories per person per day, or 4.4 per cent of current daily consumption, a recent study has found. In fact, wheat-growing regions of northern India exhibited some of the most severe projected losses across the globe.
It was more concerning as this disruption in the global food systems due to global warming will be despite climate adaptations made by farmers to their agricultural practices. These adjustments will offset about just one-third of climate-related losses by the end of century if emissions continued to rise, the study estimated.
In terms of food production capacity from six staple crops — rice, wheat, maize, soybean, sorghum and cassava — the analysis found that yield losses may average 41 per cent in the wealthiest regions and 28 per cent in the lowest income regions by 2100.
The study Impacts of climate change on global agriculture accounting for adaptation was published in the journal Nature on June 18, 2025 and was a project by the Climate Impact Lab, a research consortium.
“The steepest losses occur at the extremes of the agricultural economy: in modern breadbaskets that now enjoy some of the world’s best growing conditions, and in subsistence farming communities relying on small harvests of cassava,” the study said.
For the analysis, the team of 16 scientists projected climate impacts to yields of the six staple crops until the end of the century under a ‘high-emissions’ scenario and a ‘moderate emissions’ scenario. These crops represent two-thirds of global cropped calorie production. The estimation was done spanning diverse local climates and socioeconomic contexts across 24,378 global administrative regions in 54 countries.
For all crops except rice, the study estimated that warming will likely reduce global yields by 2050, with a probability ranging between 70 per cent (in case of sorghum) to 90 per cent (in case of wheat), under a high-emissions scenario.
For rice, the analysis pointed towards a 50 per cent chance that global rice yields will increase as warming increases, because of the rice plant’s ability to tolerate high minimum temperatures.
On the contrary, wheat crop will experience some of the most severe losses as maximum and minimum temperatures rise. Under a high-emissions scenario, the scientists estimated yield losses of 40-100 per cent in northern and central India, 30 to 40 per cent in China, Russia, the United States and Canada and 15 to 25 per cent in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Africa, and South America.
The modelling found that adaptation and development exacerbated average wheat losses from climate change “because wheat producers are observed to take on further weather-related risk as GDP per capita rises”.
The study estimated that development and adaptive adjustments reduced global calorie impacts by roughly 23 per cent in 2050 and 34 per cent at the end of the century under a high-emissions scenario and by 6 and 12 per cent respectively under a moderate emissions scenario.
This relative impact of adaptation was largest for rice (79 per cent under high emissions and 86 per cent for moderate emissions) and smallest for wheat. Some of the largest regional benefits of adaptation were accrued for South America, mostly from maize and soybean adaptation gains.
The scientists found that the middle 50 per cent of regions with moderate average temperatures tend to suffer the largest yield losses, largely because hotter locations were already more adapted to heat. So, further warming has a reduced impact, whereas cold locations benefit from warming.
The projections suggested that changes in global yields affected populations around the world unequally. Total calorie production was generally affected more heavily by climate change in regions that are richer today, along with the lowest-income decile, owing to its reliance on cassava.
“This result is partially because lower-income populations tend to live in hotter climates, in which present adaptation rates are higher, and in the tropics, in which high average precipitation reduces warming impacts. This has important implications for global damages, as high-income regions include many of the world’s breadbaskets. Because relative yield losses are greatest in regions in which modern agriculture is concentrated, they have amplified influence on global caloric production under climate change,” the anaylsts wrote in the study.