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Food insecurity can be directly exacerbated by climate change due to crop-production-related impacts of warmer and drier conditions that are expected in important agricultural regions1–3. However, efforts to mitigate climate change through comprehensive, economy-wide GHG emissions reductions may also negatively affect food security, due to indirect impacts on prices and supplies of key agricultural commodities4–6. Here we conduct a multiple model assessment on the combined effects of climate change and climate mitigation efforts on agricultural commodity prices, dietary energy availability and the population at risk of hunger. A robust finding is that by 2050, stringent climate mitigation policy, if implemented evenly across all sectors and regions, would have a greater negative impact on global hunger and food consumption than the direct impacts of climate change. The negative impacts would be most prevalent in vulnerable, low-income regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where food security problems are already acute.

This paper analyses how climate change might impact EU agricultural markets by mid-century, considering a large ensemble of climate change projections from different models, market adjustments and trade feedbacks. Applying consistent climate change productivity shocks to a global multi-commodity agricultural market model we show that the negative direct effects from climate change on crop production in the EU could be offset by market and trade adjustments. The simulations reveal that climate change has heterogeneous impacts across regions. EU farmers, in particular, might actually benefit from climate change as the impacts on agricultural productivity are expected to be more severe in important non-EU production regions such as US, Russia and Ukraine, depending on the crop. Higher producer prices lead to an increase in EU production and exports. For instance EU wheat production could increase by 13% and exports by 28%, with 19% higher farm incomes on average than in a business-as-usual situation. Our study has several limitations. In particular, we do not consider CO2 fertilization effects and direct effect from climate change on livestock sector, climate variability and extreme weather effects. Nevertheless, our findings highlight the heterogeneity of climate change impacts across regions, specifically Northern versus Southern Europe, and the importance of market and trade adjustments as economic adaptation mechanisms to climate change.

The risk of food-supply instability is expected to increase along with the frequency and intensity of extreme agro-climatic events in many regions. Assessing the sensitivity of the global agricultural system to evolving extremes requires the probability of occurrence of such events to be estimated and their links with potential food supply and demand culminations to be established. From this perspective, in this article we implement a novel approach that can be used as a tool to inform decision-makers about the resilience of agricultural markets to climate extremes. By incorporating simulated climate-stress events into a partial-equilibrium model of interconnected agricultural commodity markets, we examine the complex manifestations of grain supply, demand and prices attributable to hazardous extremes. Market outcomes are further synthesized into coherently defined vulnerability and risk indicators. The proposed framework currently covers compound heat and water anomalies at the country level, potentially concurrent and recurrent, that impact annual crop yields and market balances in a recursive-dynamic manner until 2030. Our findings indicate that extreme-climate anomalies significantly distort expected market equilibria in the medium term. Moreover, extreme global prices may result either from climate anomalies in single key countries or from simultaneous events in many regions. Last but not least, trade and storage come forth as important alleviative mechanisms of the market uncertainty provoked by recurrent extremes.

While countries have agreed in the Paris-agreement on common rules to report greenhouse gas emissions, the design of domestic climate policy regimes remains in the national domain. This may cause different carbon prices for climate gasses across countries, between a country's emission sectors, and within the same sector. Our focus is on methane, which is a major emitter from agriculture, but also linked to livestock farming which is a core activity in agriculture worldwide. We analyse the potential effects of domestic carbon pricing regimes for agriculture in a non-cooperative game theoretic setting using a global agricultural sector model. Our results indicate no ‘race to the bottom’ to apply carbon pricing regimes that result in lowest implicit carbon prices for methane. Enforcing a uniform regime can reduce additional global warming with up to 0.02 °C, but runs the risk of agreeing to lower emission cuts than a nationally determined choice would suggest.

Extreme weather events are occurrences of unusually severe weather or climate conditions that can devastate local communities, agriculture and natural ecosystems. Due to climate change, these extreme events are becoming increasingly more likely, lasting longer, and more severe in impact. In this paper, we illustrate the potential effects of concurrent and recurrent extreme weather events on EU agricultural commodity markets and, in particular, on production and trade. A combination of concurrent and recurrent events is expected to have a negative and compounding effect on domestic food supply and trade, making EU agricultural markets less resilient. A set of scenarios based on record low yields show how EU production could be drastically affected compared to a business-as-usual situation. Market disruptions would be potentially larger for commodities in which the EU has a strong net exporter position, such as wheat. In the absence of extremes in non-EU regions, trade reveals as a key element in buffering the adverse impacts of extreme events in the EU.

The EU has a historical deficit of plant protein and is heavily reliant on imports to sustain domestic livestock production. Using an economic model of global agricultural markets, this article investigates three policy drivers that could have an influence on the increased production of protein-rich crops in the EU, namely coupled payments for protein-rich crops, investment in research and development leading to higher yields, and phasing out of imported high indirect land-use change risk biofuel feedstocks. Results indicate that a one per cent annual increase in yields over the medium-term has a much larger effect on EU domestic protein production than additional coupled payments of EUR 75 per ha. Moreover, phasing out palm-based biodiesel only has a small impact on protein self-sufficiency. A significant unknown is how costly it will be to increase the yields on protein crops grown in the EU.

This paper analyses the impacts on global agricultural markets of the demand shock caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the first wave of lockdown measures imposed by the governments in the first semester of 2020 to contain it. Specifically, we perform a scenario-based analysis on the IMF economic growth forecasts for 2020 and 2021 using a global multi-commodity agricultural market model. According to our results, the sharp decline in economic growth causes a decrease in international meat prices by 7–18% in 2020 and dairy products by 4–7% compared to a business as usual situation. Following the slowdown of the economy, biofuel prices fall strongly in 2020, followed by their main feedstocks, maize and oilseeds. Although the income losses and local supply chain disruptions associated with the pandemic undoubtedly has led to an increase in food insecurity in many developing countries, global food consumption is largely unaffected due to the inelastic demand of most agricultural commodities and the short duration of the shock. From an environmental viewpoint, the COVID-19 impacts point to a modest reduction of direct greenhouse gases from agriculture of about 1% or 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents in 2020 and 2021.

Agricultural CH4 and N2O emissions represent around 11% of total anthropogenic GHGs. Here agriculture mitigation potentials are quantified, in the context of the 1.5 °C target, and decomposed by emission source, region and mitigation mechanism.

Systematic model inter-comparison helps to narrow discrepancies in the analysis of the future impact of climate change on agricultural production. This paper presents a set of alternative scenarios by five global climate and agro-economic models. Covering integrated assessment (IMAGE), partial equilibrium (CAPRI, GLOBIOM, MAgPIE) and computable general equilibrium (MAGNET) models ensures a good coverage of biophysical and economic agricultural features. These models are harmonized with respect to basic model drivers, to assess the range of potential impacts of climate change on the agricultural sector by 2050. Moreover, they quantify the economic consequences of stringent global emission mitigation efforts, such as non-CO2 emission taxes and land-based mitigation options, to stabilize global warming at 2 °C by the end of the century under different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. A key contribution of the paper is a vis-à-vis comparison of climate change impacts relative to the impact of mitigation measures. In addition, our scenario design allows assessing the impact of the residual climate change on the mitigation challenge. From a global perspective, the impact of climate change on agricultural production by mid-century is negative but small. A larger negative effect on agricultural production, most pronounced for ruminant meat production, is observed when emission mitigation measures compliant with a 2 °C target are put in place. Our results indicate that a mitigation strategy that embeds residual climate change effects (RCP2.6) has a negative impact on global agricultural production relative to a no-mitigation strategy with stronger climate impacts (RCP6.0). However, this is partially due to the limited impact of the climate change scenarios by 2050. The magnitude of price changes is different amongst models due to methodological differences. Further research to achieve a better harmonization is needed, especially regarding endogenous food and feed demand, including substitution across individual commodities, and endogenous technological change.