N°Spécial De Revue/Special Issue Agrociencia Uruguay Année : 2025

Climate change and variability impacts on agriculture

Résumé

While agriculture is crucial to feeding people, it is strongly impacted by climate change and variability, and also contributes to it. Agriculture and land use change are responsible for around ¼ of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. Climate change already impacts the quantity, quality and geographic distribution of food production from agriculture. Projected impact shows that 10% and more than 30% of current food production areas will be unsuitable by 2050 and then 2100 respectively, under the high-emissions scenario SSP-8.5 (compared with less than 8% by 2100 under the scenario SSP1-2.6). The negative effects of climate change are expected for all crops (perennial and annual crops) and latest 21st-century projections using ensembles of crop and climate models suggest a significant impact on yields for several major producing regions before 2040. Impacts on the geographical distribution of food production will lead to an increase in the number of people threatened by hunger and will further increase pressure on the terrestrial ecosystem services (ES) that support global food systems. These intertwined interactions create a vicious circle, with agriculture contributing to climate change, which in turn puts pressure on the sustainability and productivity of agricultural systems. Faced with these crucial challenges, sustainable and resilient agricultural practices that explore innovative solutions to mitigate the environmental footprint of agrosystems while strengthening the capacity of agricultural systems to adapt to climate change are urgently needed. This broad ambition requires solving multiple challenges, one of which is the scale of design and implementation. Most research into climate change adaptation of agriculture is carried out at continental to global scale and considers abrupt adaptation, such as substituting a particular type of crop or shifting a crop to another region. However, landscape and land use can generate a high spatial variability of climate, which may increase or decrease the impact of climate change at local scales. And adaptation and mitigation strategies are generally applied at local scale by local authorities and farmers. The issue of mitigation is also crucial, as shifting to more productive areas under future climate conditions may be considered an effective strategy, but such adjustments will have a significant impact on mitigation efforts.

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Dates et versions

hal-05271401 , version 1 (22-09-2025)

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Mercedes Fourment, Guadalupe Tiscornia, Hervé Quénol. Climate change and variability impacts on agriculture. Agrociencia Uruguay, 29, 2025, ⟨10.31285/agro.29.1758⟩. ⟨hal-05271401⟩
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