World food systems ‘pushed to the brink’ by extreme heat, UN warns. Guardian  Fiona Harvey Environment editor 22 April 2026 Severe heatwaves in commonly hot regions could leave farmers unable to work outside, with livestock mortality rates expected to rise. Extreme heat is threatening the world’s food systems, with farmers unable to work outside, livestock experiencing stress and crop yields falling, putting the livelihoods of more than a billion people in peril, the UN has warned.

Experts said food supply in some areas was being “pushed to the brink” by increasingly common and severe heatwaves, on land and at sea, in a major report written jointly by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Farmers could find it impossible to work safely for as many as 250 days of the year – more than two-thirds of the time – in already hot regions including much of India and south Asia, tropical sub-Saharan Africa and swathes of Central and South America. Livestock are already experiencing an increase in mortality rates, as heat stress begins for common species at about 25C. Extreme heat reduces yields from dairy cows and cuts the fat and protein content of milk. Pigs and chickens are unable to sweat and, as temperatures rise, face digestive tract breakdowns, organ failure and cardiovascular shock.

Yields begin to decline at temperatures above 30C for most agricultural crops, with damage including weakened cell walls and the production of toxins. The yields of maize in some areas have declined by about 10%. Wheat has fallen by nearly as much, and is projected to decline further as temperatures rise to more than 1.5C above preindustrial levels. Ocean heatwaves are also killing fish, as heat reduces the level of dissolved oxygen in the water, leading to mass decline in populations.Much more could be done to warn farmers, as heatwaves are often predictable, according to the report published on Wednesday. Weather forecasts and mobile phone communications could be used to alert farmers when extreme weather is expected.

Richard Waite, the director of agriculture initiatives at the World Resources Institute thinktank, who was not involved in the report, said it was crucial to start adapting to rising temperatures now, by giving farmers the tools, knowhow and early warnings to help them anticipate and protect against extreme weather.“Without adaptation, extreme heat will cut crop and livestock yields, forcing more land into agriculture to maintain food production. That would drive even higher emissions from land use change, which in turn would make climate impacts on agriculture even worse,” he said. “What’s needed is the opposite: scaling solutions that help farmers maintain and sustainably increase productivity, even in a changing climate, so we can break that vicious cycle rather than reinforce it.”

Morgan Ody, a small-scale farmer and the general coordinator of La Via Campesina, a global organisation of food and land workers and small farmers, said the lives of working people were increasingly at risk. “Farmers, agricultural workers and small-scale fisherfolk – especially women and elderly people among them – whose livelihoods depend on daily work in fields, rivers and oceans, are highly vulnerable to extreme heat, which also threatens their health and lives. These extreme weather events are driven in large part by industrial monocultures and livestock systems that emit large amounts of greenhouse gases,” she said.Ody called for compensation for such workers for the losses they experience from extreme weather, debt relief and public investment in adaptive measures, as well as rules on worker safety that would limit how long workers in fields and on boats could be exposed to high temperatures and force employers to provide shade, rest and water. In the longer term, she called for the replacement of intensive farming with more nature-friendly methods.

Modern industrialised food systems rely on a narrow range of staple crops, and highly specialised systems that are dependent on inputs such as fertiliser. That makes them highly vulnerable and less able to cope with shocks, such as extreme heat, according to Molly Anderson, professor of food studies at Middlebury College in Vermont and expert with the IPES-Food thinktank, who was not involved with the report. Anderson called for the development of a more diverse food system, better equipped to withstand shocks, and a reversal of trends in intensive agriculture that have robbed farms of trees, shade and mixtures of crops and livestock.......read on      https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/22/world-food-systems-extreme-heat-farming-un-report

The world has the science to transform food systems. The next frontier is scaling it.  The Conversation Timothy KrupnikDirector - CGIAR Scaling for Impact  June 30, 2026 The world’s food systems face real and urgent challenges. These include climate change, nutrition insecurity, food safety, and unequal access to markets. Research has produced practical solutions to each of these that could benefit hundreds of millions of people. Too few are moved into widespread use.For years, the development sector has flattered itself with pilots. A new tool works in a controlled pilot, a crop variety performs well in a field trial, and a digital advisory service shows promise in early testing. Evidence is written up, a case study or experiment is published, and then comes the familiar refrain: now we need to “take it to scale”. That is the moment the real difficulty begins.

Solutions do not spread simply because they are good. They move, or fail to move, through systems where scientific supply and demand for innovative solutions are frequently misaligned. Policy environments are not ready, financing is difficult to mobilise, demand is weak, and markets are not designed to carry promising ideas beyond their pilot phase. These are some of the challenges that have faced CGIAR, the world’s largest publicly funded research-for-development partnership focused on agriculture and food systems. But these challenges are not limited to CGIAR alone; they are common in research for development.The world does not just need more breakthroughs. It needs more organisations that know how to turn scientific advances into adoption, investment and lasting use. Put plainly, it needs stronger efforts to move proven science into widespread use. That sounds abstract. It is not. As director of CGIAR’s Scaling for Impact Program, which works with partners across Africa, Asia and Latin America to connect innovations with the systems and investments needed to scale them, I have seen this pattern myself. The evidence from that work consistently points to the same conclusion: scaling must be treated as a core part of the scientific process – built into research from the start, with systems thinking prioritised, not treated as a final phase.

What it takes to scale up.....Scaling is about asking different questions earlier in the research process – identifying the challenges that prevent innovations from moving into use, and charting strategies and actions to overcome them. Not just: does this solution work? But: who will deliver it, who will pay for it, what incentive do they have, what regulations apply, what evidence unlocks funding, and what has to change in the surrounding system for uptake to last beyond a project cycle? Those questions are rarely asked early enough in the research process. Yet they determine whether a promising idea becomes a public good or another stranded pilot. One example of what this looks like in practice is a “clearinghouse” created under the African Development Bank’s Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation programme, now integrated into the CGIAR Scaling for Impact programme. Its role is not to invent new technologies, but to make proven ones usable at scale: validating them, packaging them with complementary innovations, and linking them to large public investments and agricultural delivery systems. That model is now positioned to connect agricultural innovations to a US$1.5 billion AfDB-backed portfolio in 2026, expected to benefit 3.4 million additional smallholder farmers. In Nigeria, it helped connect heat-tolerant wheat varieties – developed to maintain yields as temperatures rise – to an AfDB-financed programme backed by US$134 million, contributing to a sharp expansion in wheat area over two years. The point is not only that the varieties worked. It is that someone built the bridge between science and investment......read on                      https://theconversation.com/the-world-has-the-science-to-transform-food-systems-the-next-frontier-is-scaling-it-282881 

Agricultural methods have intensified continuously ever since the Industrial Revolution, and even more so since the “green revolution” in the middle decades of the twentieth century. At each stage, innovations in farming techniques brought about huge increases in crop yields per acre of arable land. This tremendous rise in food production has sustained a global population that has quadrupled in size over the span of one century. As the human population continues to grow, so too has the amount of space dedicated to feeding it. According to World Bank figures, in 2022, more than 730 million hectares (1.8 billion acres) were devoted to growing corn, wheat, rice and other staple cereal grains—nearly half of all cultivated land on the planet. In the coming decades, however, meeting the demand for accelerated agricultural productivity is likely to be more difficult than it has been so far. Global climate change is destabilizing many of the natural processes that make modern agriculture possible. Yet modern agriculture itself also adds to the crisis of sustainability. Many of the techniques and modifications farmers use to boost output also bring harmful environmental effects. Below are three ways intensive agriculture threatens the precarious balance of non-agricultural ecosystems.

Irrigation Worldwide, agriculture accounts for 70% of human freshwater consumption. A great deal of this water is redirected onto cropland through irrigation schemes of varying kinds. Experts predict that to keep a growing population fed, water extraction may need to increase by an additional 20% or more by 2050. Irrigation supports the enormous crop yields that such a large population demands. Many of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, from California’s Central Valley to southern Europe’s arid Mediterranean basin, have become economically dependent on heavy irrigation. Irrigation also allows for food to be grown in places it would not otherwise grow, including in deserts.

Researchers and farmers alike are becoming increasingly aware of the consequences of this large-scale diversion of freshwater. One of the most obvious consequences is the depletion of aquifers, river systems and downstream ground water. While irrigation can waste water, most farmers do not intentionally waste or overuse this resource. Water waste can happen when irrigation equipment is out of date or not installed properly, or if there are inadequate cover crops to protect soil conditions. Correcting these issues and improving irrigation technology can be costly. Sociopolitical factors, including challenges with decision making among scientists and stakeholders, can also lead to overuse of water. Additionally, crops that require irrigation are typically in high demand and profitable. For example, cropland for corn and soybeans may increasingly require irrigation due to climate change impacts. Some of these issues can be mitigated with improved education and financial resources for farmers.

There are a number of other environmental consequences related to irrigation. Areas drenched by irrigation can become waterlogged, decreasing oxygen availability in the soil. This can harm plant roots and growth. Waterlogged soils can also accrue too much salt, further harming plant growth. Irrigation causes increases in water evaporation, impacting both surface air temperature and pressure as well as atmospheric moisture conditions. Recent studies have confirmed that cropland irrigation can influence rainfall patterns not only over the irrigated area but dozens to maybe hundreds of kilometers away. Irrigation has also been connected to the erosion of coastlines and other kinds of long-term ecological damage and habitat destruction.

Livestock Grazing -A huge amount of agricultural territory is used primarily as pasture for cattle—cows that humans raise for meat or milk—and other livestock. In many areas, raising cows for meat and dairy is profitable because of the high demand for these products. In some countries, including the United States, raising cows is incentivized through subsidies. In the western United States, counting both federally managed and privately owned grazing lands, hundreds of millions of acres are set aside for this purpose, more than for any other type of land use. Agricultural livestock are responsible for a large proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions, most notably methane. In addition, cows overgrazing pastureland is a major problem regarding environmental sustainability. In some places, cows and other livestock consume stretches of forage land so extensively that grasses are unable to regenerate. The root systems of native vegetation can be damaged so much that the species die off. Near streambeds or other bodies of water where cattle concentrate, the combination of overgrazing and fecal wastes can contaminate water sources. Cows and other large grazing animals can even damage soil by trampling on it, compacting the soil. Bare, compacted land can bring about soil erosion and destruction of topsoil quality due to the runoff of nutrients. These and other impacts can destabilize a variety of fragile ecosystems and wildlife habitats.

Livestock grazing is a serious threat to the Amazon Rainforest, where land cleared for raising cows accounts for 80% of deforestation. The Amazon is a hub of biodiversity and is home to 10% of known species. Forests also play a significant role in climate regulation. The world relies on the Amazon Rainforest in particular for regulating the global water cycle and storing carbon, but deforestation from agriculture threatens this vital role. People who live in the Amazon Rainforest are directly affected by agricultural practices there, since some of these operations engage in illegal practices, employ harsh working conditions and displace Indigenous people.,,,,read on https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/environmental-impacts-agricultural-modifications/