The future of climate change and food system research: 2025 Global Food Policy Report

The realities of a changing climate are becoming increasingly clear, with temperatures rising around the world and extreme weather events, like flooding and droughts, becoming more and more frequent. April 2025 was the second hottest April globally on record, and evidence suggests such anomalous high temperatures could become the norm rather than the exception.

The shifting climate brings with it serious concerns about agriculture and food systems around the world. As a result, policymakers and food policy research practitioners have begun to prioritize not just policies to mitigate the risk of climate change but also adaptation strategies to help the most vulnerable populations increase their resilience in the face of changing weather and agricultural patterns.

Chapter Four of IFPRI’s 2025 Global Food Policy Report examines this shift in research from projections of the global and national impacts of climate change on food systems to assessments of farm- and individual-level risk and a focus on climate-smart agriculture. It also highlights promising pathways for future research to help policymakers better design, target, and implement climate change interventions to support more secure, sustainable, and inclusive food systems.

To date, a majority of the models used to project and analyze the impact of climate change on agriculture and food systems have focused on staple crops like maize, rice, wheat, and soybeans. While the estimated impacts of climate change on these crops vary, most agree on one core finding: climate change has already reduced yields and total factor productivity for these important crops, with far-reaching negative consequences for food security.

The chapter reports that by 2050, climate change will drive global commodity prices up by as much as 18 percent compared to a no-climate-change scenario. Under such a scenario, as many as 78 million more people will face chronic hunger. Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) will bear much of the burden, with the majority of increased hunger occurring in Africa south of the Sahara. Smallholder producers—who make up the majority of agricultural producers in LMICs—will also continue to face reduced crop yields, negatively impacting their livelihoods and further exacerbating hunger outcomes.

Offsetting this increased hunger could cost upward of $24.7 billion annually, the modeling suggests. This cost includes investments in agricultural research, water provision, and other infrastructure.  

As the threats to both food security and agricultural livelihoods in LMICs become increasingly evident, helping producers adapt to the challenges posed by the changing climate has become an urgent priority for both researchers and policymakers. This includes efforts like diversifying production with an emphasis on heat- and drought-resistant crop varieties and livestock species, enhancing water and soil management practices, encouraging adoption of precision agriculture, and increasing communication around extreme weather events and education around climate-smart agriculture.

This shift in focus has also contributed to the rise of climate-smart agriculture as a policy objective. Climate-smart agriculture measures agricultural practices and climate change policies against three main goals: agricultural productivity, climate change adaptation, and climate change mitigation. Early models have shown that climate-smart agricultural practices can support all three goals, as well as reducing hunger and increasing food accessibility. However, the report emphasizes that to be both effective and inclusive, climate-smart agricultural policies need to be targeted to address local and national political contexts, cultural and societal factors, and agroecological conditions.

The chapter concludes with several recommendations to drive the future of climate change and food system research and policymaking. They include:

• improving identification of “hotspots” where agriculture is most at risk from climate change and extreme weather events,
• combining yield projections with more localized data about populations’ vulnerability to the impacts of climate change,
• enhancing current models to capture the frequency and impact of extreme weather events and include data regarding the impacts of climate change on labor productivity, nutrition, and economic growth,
• integrating a climate change perspective into agricultural and food policies, national planning, and budgets,
• identifying policies and strategies that can be scaled up or down to meet global, national, and local needs, and
• finding ways to make climate-smart agriculture and other climate governance policies more inclusive and equitable, particularly women and poor populations.

Sara Gustafson is a freelance writer.