Building soil to reduce climate change impacts on global crop yield

Summary

This global analysis quantifies the protective role of soil health in buffering crop yields against climate warming. Using random forest modelling on global datasets, the authors found that each °C of warming reduced yields by 0.3–5.0% depending on crop, but that improving soil organic carbon could substantially mitigate these losses—avoiding 3–5% of global yield loss per °C warming and potentially providing an additional 20–130 million tonnes of food production. The findings underscore soil carbon enhancement as a broadly implementable climate adaptation strategy with particular relevance for vulnerable regions.

UK applicability

The study's global scope includes temperate regions where UK cereals are grown, suggesting relevance to UK farming adaptation under climate change. However, UK-specific impacts would depend on how soil quality improvements align with regional crop-climate interactions, and the transferability of global random forest patterns to the UK's specific soil types, management histories and climate trajectories would require site-level validation.

Key measures

Percentage yield loss per °C warming; soil organic carbon concentration; spatial distribution of warming impacts; projected food production gains (million tonnes) under soil carbon sequestration scenarios; proportion of planting area benefiting from improved SOC

Outcomes reported

The study quantified yield losses from climate warming for four major crops (maize, wheat, rice, soybean) and modelled how improved soil organic carbon (SOC) could mitigate these losses across global croplands. Spatial heterogeneity in warming responses was explained primarily by soil quality metrics, with projections of additional food production achievable through soil carbon sequestration under future warming scenarios.

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