Future warming increases probability of globally synchronized maize production shocks.

ABSTRACT: Meeting the global food demand of roughly 10 billion people by the middle of the 21st century will become increasingly challenging as the Earth's climate continues to warm. Earlier studies suggest that once the optimum growing temperature is exceeded, mean crop yields decline and the variability of yield increases even if interannual climate variability remains unchanged. Here, we use global datasets of maize production and climate variability combined with future temperature projections to quantify how yield variability will change in the world's major maize-producing and -exporting countries under 2 °C and 4 °C of global warming. We find that as the global mean temperature increases, absent changes in temperature variability or breeding gains in heat tolerance, the coefficient of variati

SUBMITTER: Tigchelaar M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6042138 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature