Climate Impacts on Global Food Production

Climate change is already measurably affecting global agricultural output, not merely as a future risk. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report, in its 2022 Working Group II volume on impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, concluded that anthropogenic climate change has already slowed the growth of global agricultural productivity over recent decades relative to what it would otherwise have been, even as productivity has continued rising in absolute terms thanks to technology and input use; the report projects further, more severe yield reductions for staple crops including maize, wheat, and rice under continued warming, with impacts distributed highly unevenly across regions and generally more severe in lower-latitude, already warmer developing countries than in higher-latitude temperate zones.