Climate Change–Induced Impacts on Major Crop Production: A Systematic Literature Review

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:A consolidated evidence base on climate-crop yield relationships, useful for multi-crop modeling and adaptation research.

🏢実務担当者:Limited direct applicability; insights on crop yield sensitivity may inform agricultural risk assessments for companies with South Asian supply chains.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights gaps in adaptive capacity and the need for decentralized, inclusive policies and climate finance, relevant for developing countries.

Background: Climate change has shifted from a projected long-run threat to an immediate driver of agricultural instability, and nowhere is this transition more consequential than in South Asia, where rain-fed and irrigated systems sustain hundreds of millions of livelihoods. Pakistan, repeatedly ranked among the most climate-vulnerable nations, depends on agriculture for roughly a fifth of its gross domestic product and almost half of national employment, making the climate sensitivity of its principal crops a question of food security and macroeconomic stability alike. This systematic review synthesizes evidence on the impacts of climate change on the production of four major staple crops such as wheat, rice, cotton, and sugarcane, with the aims of identifying consistent patterns and divergences across crops and regions, integrating biophysical, hydrological, socio-economic, and policy dimensions within a single analytical frame, and exposing persistent research gaps. Methods: A systematic search was conducted across three major databases; Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar covering the period January 2015 to May 2025, with the last search completed in May 2025. Boolean search strings combined crop-specific and climate-specific terms (e.g., “climate change AND wheat yield,” “rice AND heat stress AND South Asia,” “cotton AND drought,” “sugarcane AND climate variability”). The initial database search identified approximately 1,200 records; after removal of duplicates and title-and-abstract screening, almost 97 full-text articles were assessed for eligibility. Applying pre-specified inclusion criteria i.e. peer-reviewed English-language studies engaging substantively with crop production and climate variables, published 2015–2025, supplemented by foundational pre-2015 works and authoritative institutional reports essential for theoretical grounding, a final corpus of 74 studies was included in the narrative synthesis. Screening followed a PRISMA-informed framework, with crop relevance and methodological transparency as the principal eligibility filters. Quality appraisal assessed each study against three criteria: clarity of the climate variable operationalised, explicitness of the crop-level outcome measured, and transparency of the analytical method; studies satisfying all three criteria were treated as primary evidence, while those meeting two were included as corroborating evidence. Across the included studies, the evidence broadly indicates a negative relationship between warming and cereal productivity; yield-loss figures reported across the selected studies range from approximately 5% to 15% per 1°C of seasonal warming for wheat, depending on the region, crop stage, and method of analysis, and from roughly 7% to 10% per 1°C above the biological optimum for rice, driven primarily by heat-induced spikelet sterility. These figures reflect ranges reported across individual selected studies rather than pooled meta-analytic estimates, and considerable methodological heterogeneity warrants caution in direct comparison. Cotton and sugarcane display acute sensitivity to compound heat, drought, flooding, and shifting pest pressure, as dramatically illustrated by the 2022 Pakistan floods. A recurring perception–observation gap and fragmented policy implementation weaken adaptive capacity across the region. This review provides the first integrative synthesis to systematically connect biophysical yield evidence with hydrological, socio-economic, and governance dimensions for all four major crops of South Asia within a single IPCC AR6 risk framework, offering a consolidated evidence base for multi-sectoral adaptation planning. Conclusions: Building resilience requires localized multi-crop modelling, mixed-methods research integrating expert and farmer perceptions, accessible climate finance, and inclusive, decentralized policy supported by digital climate information services.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.70670/sra.v4i1.2210first seen 2026-07-01 05:57:54