Climate Trends and Global Crop Production Since 1980 by David B. Lobell et al., Science (May 6, 2011); DOI: 10.1126/science.1204531

Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1204531

Climate Trends and Global Crop Production Since 1980

1. David B. Lobell¹,*, 
2. Wolfram Schlenker²,³, and 
3. Justin Costa-Roberts¹

1. ¹Department of Environmental Earth System Science and Program on Food Security and the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
2. ²Department of Economics and School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
3. ³National Bureau of Economic Research, New York, NY 10016, USA.

ABSTRACT

Efforts to anticipate how climate change will affect future food availability can benefit from understanding the impacts of changes to date. Here, we show that in the cropping regions and growing seasons of most countries, with the important exception of the United States, temperature trends for 1980–2008 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, compared 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, CO₂ fertilization, and other factors.

*Correspondence e-mail: dlobell@stanford.edu

Received for publication 18 February 2011. Accepted for publication 22 April 2011.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/05/04/science.1204531