NASA Finds U.S. Midwest at Highest Risk of Corn Crop Failures Due to Climate Events

A new study conducted by NASA and published in Environmental Research Letters, outlines how extreme weather events, such as heat waves, drought, or floods, will cluster closer together in both time and space, raising the risk of crop failures and other hazards.

Increases in heat waves, droughts, or excessive rainfall will double the risk by 2100 of climate-related failures of corn harvests happening in the same year in at least three of the world’s six major corn-growing regions - with the U.S. Midwest being at the highest risk of being the site of multiple harvest failures.

The model used in the study is able to represent extreme event clusters, such as the effects of extreme heat waves followed by extreme rainfall, and how the clustering of both temperature and precipitation hazards will affect corn crops. The model showed that by 2100, extreme heat waves around the world will occur two to four times more often as they do today, while extreme rainfall will increase in frequency by 10-50 percent. As these events occur more often and closer geographically, the chance that the cluster events will result in a corn crop failure in at least three of the world’s breadbaskets in the same year will nearly double from 29 percent to 57 percent. And the chances that harvests will fail in all five of the breadbasket regions in a single year will increase significantly from 0.6 percent - 5.4 percent. The U.S. Midwest is most likely to be included in years where crops fail in three breadbasket regions, followed by Central Europe.

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