Climate Trends and Global Crop Production Since 1980
Abstract
Efforts to anticipate how climate change will affect future food availability can benefit from understanding the impacts of changes to date. We found that in the cropping regions and growing seasons of most countries, with the important exception of the United States, temperature trends from 1980 to 2008 exceeded one standard deviation of historic year-to-year variability. Models that link yields of the four largest commodity crops to weather indicate that global maize and wheat production declined by 3.8 and 5.5%, respectively, relative to a counterfactual without climate trends. For soybeans and rice, winners and losers largely balanced out. Climate trends were large enough in some countries to offset a significant portion of the increases in average yields that arose from technology, carbon dioxide fertilization, and other factors.
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Science
Volume 333 | Issue 6042
29 July 2011
29 July 2011
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Copyright © 2011, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Submission history
Received: 18 February 2011
Accepted: 22 April 2011
Published in print: 29 July 2011
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments: We thank five anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. Supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, NASA new investigator grant NNX08AV25G (D.B.L.), and NSF grant SES-0962625.
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