Scientists develop interactive platform that predicts decline in global agricultural production

A research team from the Institute of Economic Analysis (IAE), part of Spain's National Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), has launched a cutting-edge interactive platform capable of predicting how the planet will gradually lose its ability to produce food due to the climate change crisis.

The new tool, called "CADI" (Climate-Induced Agricultural Decline Index), works with a high geographical accuracy of nine square kilometers, and calculates the size of agricultural land that will lose its productive capacity until 2100.

The model isolates the drainage impact of climate while keeping crops that were actually planted in 2020 constant, allowing the results to be seen away from human decisions about adaptation or crop type change, the researchers explained.

The team built this platform by combining data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) historical crop yield records, with the climate records of the European Copernicus Programme, to make accurate future forecasts based on IPCC scenarios.

Geographical disparity, winners and losers in Europe

Actual data recorded on the platform revealed that one in six agricultural fields in the world has already lost more than 10% of its potential productivity over the past two decades.

These losses are unevenly distributed globally, with major damages concentrated in the tropics, while some areas with high northern latitudes record a slight gain in productivity but not enough to make up for the global calorie deficit.

On the European continent, the data show a clear divide between north and south: agricultural capacity is rising in Scandinavia, Scotland and the Alps, while declining sharply in southern Europe.

Researcher Hans Müller told Euronews that Spain is experiencing this imbalance internally, with the Cantabrian strip, Galicia and the Pyrenees recording production gains, while the Spanish interior and the central east of the peninsula are facing severe losses that in some arid areas have killed vegetation and reduced soil fertility.

Existential threats facing the next generation

Researchers have warned of the repercussions of continued global warming on a medium-to-high trajectory leading to an increase of 2.1 degrees Celsius by mid-century, which could cause food security damage for about half of the planet's population between 2041 and 2060, compared to about 15 percent currently.

Only 5% of the tropics have accumulated nearly 35% of total global losses, and a quarter of the world's countries are expected to bear between 85% and 90% of the total damage by mid-century.

The CSIC report stressed that there is a clear structural injustice, as the countries that emit the least greenhouse gases are the most likely to lose their land and agriculture.

Through these projections to the end of the century, CADI aims to enable governments to identify areas in need of support in advance, direct resources to introduce new crops and use alternative agricultural technologies before rural incomes decline and forced migrations.