Impacts of El Niño Southern Oscillation on the global yields of major crops

Toshichika Iizumi (), Jing-Jia Luo, Andrew J. Challinor, Gen Sakurai, Masayuki Yokozawa, Hirofumi Sakuma, Molly E. Brown and Toshio Yamagata
Additional contact information
Toshichika Iizumi: National Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences
Jing-Jia Luo: Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, Bureau of Meteorology
Andrew J. Challinor: Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds
Gen Sakurai: National Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences
Masayuki Yokozawa: Graduate School of Engineering, Shizuoka University
Hirofumi Sakuma: Research Institute for Global Change, Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences, JAMSTEC
Molly E. Brown: Biospheric Sciences Branch, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Toshio Yamagata: Application Laboratory, Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences, JAMSTEC

Nature Communications, 2014, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract The monitoring and prediction of climate-induced variations in crop yields, production and export prices in major food-producing regions have become important to enable national governments in import-dependent countries to ensure supplies of affordable food for consumers. Although the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) often affects seasonal temperature and precipitation, and thus crop yields in many regions, the overall impacts of ENSO on global yields are uncertain. Here we present a global map of the impacts of ENSO on the yields of major crops and quantify its impacts on their global-mean yield anomalies. Results show that El Niño likely improves the global-mean soybean yield by 2.1—5.4% but appears to change the yields of maize, rice and wheat by −4.3 to +0.8%. The global-mean yields of all four crops during La Niña years tend to be below normal (−4.5 to 0.0%). Our findings highlight the importance of ENSO to global crop production.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (47)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4712 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:5:y:2014:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms4712

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms4712

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().