Matches and mismatches between the global distribution of major food crops and climate suitability.

Over the course of history, humans have moved crops from their regions of origin to new locations across the world. The social, cultural and economic drivers of these movements have generated differences not only between current distributions of crops and their climatic origins, but also between crop distributions and climate suitability for their production. Although these mismatches are particularly important to inform agricultural strategies on climate change adaptation, they have, to date, not been quantified consistently at the global level. Here, we show that the relationships between the distributions of 12 major food crops and climate suitability for their yields display strong variation globally. After investigating the role of biophysical, socio-economic and historical factors, we report that high-income world regions display a better match between crop distribution and climate suitability. In addition, although crops are farmed predominantly in the same climatic range as their wild progenitors, climate suitability is not necessarily higher there, a pattern that reflects the legacy of domestication history on current crop distribution. Our results reveal how far the global distribution of major crops diverges from their climatic optima and call for greater consideration of the multiple dimensions of the crop socio-ecological niche in climate change adaptive strategies.

Project(s)

Priority 1: Ecosystem Stewardship

Funder

Funder name	Awards
European Research Council, European Union	Starting Grant Project ‘Ecophysiological and biophysical constraints on domestication in crop plants' (Grant ERC-StG-2014-639706-CONSTRAINTS)
National Institute of Food and Agriculture, United States	Grant no. 2019-67012-29733/project accession no. 1019405
Bentham-Moxon Trust, United Kingdom	BMT35-2017
Agence Nationale de la Recherche, France	ANR 17 MPGA 0004 - ASSET
Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain	Grant CGL2014-56567-R - Grant CGL2017-83855-R
Genome Canada