Article Contents
More than half of global cropland areas could see a decline in the number of suitable crops under a warming scenario of 2C, new research finds.
The study, published in Nature Food, projects how climate change will modify the areas suited for growing 30 major crops under four scenarios, ranging from 1.5 to 4C of global warming.
It finds that under just 1.5C of warming, more than half of the studied crops would suffer from an overall loss of potential suitable cropland, compared to the current climate.
While warming would decrease crop diversity in the tropics, it would increase in areas far from the equator, “offering opportunities for climate change adaptation”, the authors write.
One scientist, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that expanding research beyond just staple crops is “essential to understand[ing] the full impact of climate change on agriculture”, adding that “it is exciting to see more work in this space”.
Declining ‘safe’ space for crops
Cultivating a diverse range of crops contributes to a more stable and diverse food supply.
For example, having a wide variety of crops allows farmers to select the crops that will be most resilient to extreme events, such as drought.
In order to understand how climate change will affect future potential crop diversity, the researchers identify the “safe climatic space” – or climate “niche” – for 30 major crops. This approach “maps the current climatic space of the major production areas of each crop”, based on annual rainfall, biotemperature and aridity.
(Biotemperature is the average of monthly average temperatures above 0C and below 30C, and is a method of considering both temperature and growing season.)
Using the “safe climatic space” approach, the authors calculate crop diversity by counting the number of crops that could be grown in a specific area in the future.
Then, the researchers project how these areas would change under the four future warming scenarios of 1.5C, 2C, 3C and 4C above pre-industrial levels, compared to the current climate (1990-2020).
The study finds that under a 1.5C warming scenario, more than half of the 30 crops analysed would see a net decrease in their global potential cropland area. The most affected crops are wheat, barley, soya beans, lentils and potatoes.
Beyond 2C warming, the declines in suitable areas for the 30 crops become more pronounced – in some cases approaching and passing 50%, the study notes.
In a 3C scenario, all of the 30 crops studied would have their suitable cropland area reduced, with the same set of crops most affected.
The chart below shows the percentage changes in global potential cropland area for all the crops under the four warming scenarios examined. Each colour represents a level of global warming.
The 30 crops were classified into five groups: cereals, fruits and vegetables, oil crops, pulses and starchy roots.
Dr Dale Rankine is an applied climate scientist at the University of the West Indies. The expert, not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the wide range of crops analysed in the research is “commendable” and that the findings are largely in line with previous work.
Dr José Clavijo Michelangeli, chief product officer at Praedictus Climate Solutions, an agricultural data and forecasting company, notes that most studies on agriculture and climate change only focus on the impacts to main staple crops, such as maize, wheat, rice and soya beans. Clavijo Michelangeli, who was also not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief:
“Studies expanding to other crops are essential to understand the full impact of climate change on agriculture and it is exciting to see more work in this space.”
He points out that although the findings are consistent with previous understanding of the impacts of climate change on cropping systems, the climate data used to define the “safe climatic spaces” may not “align” with the responses to temperature of the crops currently grown there. He tells Carbon Brief:
“This has the potential to over or underestimate the potential change in suitability of the crop in that region.”
Unequal impacts
The study also reveals that climate change impacts on crop production and diversity will vary across regions.
Regions near the equator, such as sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia, would see the greatest declines in potential crop diversity – decreasing “on more than 70% of the cropland area if global warming exceeds 2C”, according to the study.
By contrast, global warming could increase the diversity of crops in other regions – such as North America, Europe, central Asia and Latin America. In these regions, crop diversity would increase – or see no change – on more than half of the cropland area under warming levels of up to 3C, the study says.
The map below shows the potential changes in crop diversity at 2C of warming. The inset charts show crop-diversity changes divided by regions and global warming levels, with the x-axis of the charts representing the four warming scenarios. Areas in brown represent places where crop diversity is projected to decrease, while those in blue are areas where crop diversity is projected to increase.
Adaptation opportunity
For areas that could see an increase in crop diversity, this creates “opportunities for climate change adaptation”, the authors say.
Clavijo Michelangeli says that the overall pattern of where the highest or lowest risks lie is in line with prior research. He adds:
“It is very likely that warming temperatures will not only increase diversification – which is in fact already happening – but also productivity of higher-latitude systems.
“The work is also very important in continuing to emphasise the need to do more research in tropical systems.”
Rankine warns that the benefits of increased crop production in temperate climates should not come at the expense of working to adapt agriculture in tropical climates. He argues that if future production centers on temperate countries, it could result in “a disinterest in tropical crops”.
He tells Carbon Brief that an uptick of extreme events in temperate areas in the future could endanger global food security:
“If [temperate regions] become the hub for food production, this could lead to global food shortages…This would amount to maladaptation, the opposite of diversity.”
The study calls to limit global warming to 2C “to avoid detrimental impacts on food production”, especially in the tropics, where many of the world’s most-vulnerable nations are located.
Sara Heikonen, the study’s lead author and a doctoral researcher at Finland’s Aalto University, says that any negative effect on agriculture in these regions would impact global food networks. Therefore, she says, “international collaboration and support for countries that need help with adaptation” will be critical for “developing new agricultural practices to adapt to these difficult conditions”.
The post Half of global croplands could see a drop in suitable crops at 2C of warming appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Half of global croplands could see a drop in suitable crops at 2C of warming
Continue Reading
An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
This guest post is by:
- Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor
- Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, chair of mathematical modelling of climate systems at the University of Exeter and part of the Global Carbon Project team.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
The 21st edition of the annual “global carbon budget” report, published today, says that this small decline is largely due to a 1.9% drop in emissions from oil and the energy shock triggered by the Iran conflict and the closure of the strait of Hormuz.
Emissions from coal continue to increase slightly.
The Global Carbon Project’s projections for fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions in 2026 are preliminary, with a range that spans a fall of -1.5% to a rise of +0.6%.
This means a small increase in emissions can not be ruled out.
Emissions from land-use change, such as deforestation, are projected to rise in 2026.
This is primarily driven by peat fires and forest degradation in south-east Asia and is linked to the development of a strong El Niño event this year.
As a result, total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and land use are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026 – marginally above 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
Research published alongside the report by the same team in Nature Climate Change finds that the growth in solar, wind and electric vehicles (EVs) now offsets around two-thirds of the emissions that would otherwise come from rising energy demand.
However, the deployment of these technologies is not yet enough to push global emissions into a sustained decline, according to the study.
The 2026 global carbon budget report also estimates that:
- Fossil emissions are projected to fall in China (-0.9%), the US (-1.3%) and the EU (-1.5%) in 2026, but rise by 4.4% in India.
- Oil emissions are projected to fall in every major region, with the largest drop in China (-4.6%).
- Land-use emissions averaged 4.9GtCO2 per year over 2016-25, around 21% lower than the decade before.
- Total CO2 emissions (fossil and land-use) grew by an average 0.3% per year over the past decade (2016-25), compared with 1.7% per year over the decade before.
- The remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C is 150GtCO2, or less than four years of current emissions.
- The land sink in 2025 was the highest on record, rebounding after being weakened during the 2023-24 El Niño. The current El Niño is expected to weaken the land sink in 2027.
- The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is set to reach 427.7 parts per million (ppm) in 2026, 54% above pre-industrial levels.
(For more on previous editions of the Global Carbon Project’s annual report, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2025, 2024, 2023 and 2022.)
Total emissions edge up as land-use emissions rise
Total global CO2 emissions, which combines fossil fuels and land-use change, are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026, up from 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
The increase in 2026 comes entirely from a projected rise in land-use emissions, which are more challenging to estimate than fossil emissions.
(The global carbon budget groups emissions from fossil fuels and cement production as “fossil emissions”. Carbon Brief follows this convention throughout this piece.)
If land-use emissions had stayed at 2025 levels, total emissions would have fallen slightly in 2026 to around 42.6GtCO2.
Each edition of the global carbon budget updates the historical record as new data and methods become available. The chart below shows total emissions in this year’s budget compared with the five previous editions.
This year’s estimates of historical fossil emissions are around 0.3GtCO2 per year higher than in last year’s budget.
This is largely because the report now estimates a smaller “cement carbonation” sink in the wake of research published this year in Communications Sustainability. In other words, it estimates that cement is able to slowly reabsorb less CO2 over its lifetime than previously thought.
Estimates of land-use emissions have also been revised, including a spike in 2018 – visible in the chart above – linked to updated cropland data for Colombia.
The updated numbers show that total emissions have grown by 0.3% per year over the past decade (2016-25), compared with 1.7% per year over 2006-15.
Fossil emissions grew about 0.9% per year in the past decade, compared with 1.9% the decade before. Over the same period, land-use emissions have declined.
While the slowdown reflects real progress, a plateau in emissions is still a long way from the rapid declines needed to reach net-zero emissions and stabilise global temperatures.
With human-caused warming reaching 1.37C above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900) in 2025, the report estimates that the remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C, with a 50% chance, is 150GtCO2 from the start of 2027. That is less than four years of 2026 emissions.
Meanwhile, the budgets for 1.7C and 2C are 510GtCO2 and 1,035GtCO2, respectively – or around 12 and 24 years of current emissions.
Fossil emissions made up around 88% of total CO2 emissions over the past decade, with land-use change making up the remaining 12%.
This is a marked change from the first half of the 20th century, when land-use emissions were larger than those from fossil fuels.
The figure below shows global emissions, split into fossil and land-use components.
Global per-capita fossil emissions peaked in the early 2010s and have since slightly declined. At around 4.6 tonnes per person in 2026, they are about 4% below that peak.
It is worth noting that this global average hides very large differences between countries. For example, 2025 per-capita emissions in India are only 2.2 tonnes, compared with 14.5 tonnes in the US.