A comprehensive systematic literature review examining 342 peer-reviewed studies has mapped the complex mechanisms through which climate change and biodiversity function as critical drivers of global food security. Published in Agriculture and Food Security, the investigation by Nam Vu, Michael Bourlakis, and Ioannis Manikas synthesizes decades of empirical and theoretical research to clarify how environmental shifts influence the core pillars of food security, namely availability, accessibility, utilisation, and stability. The synthesis establishes that while climate change drivers exert predominantly negative pressures across agricultural, pastoral, and marine systems, biodiversity drivers provide substantial positive contributions that enhance food yields, stabilise producer livelihoods, and support dietary quality when incorporated into food production systems. By cataloguing 11 distinct categories of climate change drivers alongside 9 categories of biodiversity drivers, the authors establish a rigorous evidence base demonstrating that environmental factors directly modify the habitats, phenology, physiology, behaviours, and resilience of exploited crop and animal species worldwide.
The imperative for this systematic synthesis arises amid intensifying global pressures on nutritional supply and distribution networks. Projections cited in the study indicate that the expanding human population is anticipated to reach 9.7 billion individuals by 2050, necessitating an estimated 70 percent increase in overall food consumption relative to contemporary baseline levels. Historical records between 1961 and 2000 show that the global human population nearly doubled, while recent estimations from 2022 demonstrate that up to 783 million people faced chronic hunger and approximately 2.4 billion individuals suffered from moderate or severe food insecurity across both developing and developed nations. In synthesizing the literature, the authors framed their core inquiry around two foundational research questions: identifying the primary climate change and biodiversity drivers affecting food systems, and determining their specific directional impacts across the four established dimensions of food security defined by the World Food Summit. A driver was defined as any natural or human-induced factor directly or indirectly causing change within an ecosystem, with the review explicitly isolating nonanthropogenic biophysical factors from broader socioeconomic drivers.
To assemble a robust and replicable corpus of evidence, the research team adopted the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines and the systematic review methodology outlined by Tranfield and colleagues. The literature search queried the Web of Science database across a search horizon spanning from 1970 through April 2023, employing a structured keyword string developed through expert academic consultations that integrated terms related to biodiversity, climatic factors, and food security dimensions. The initial database query yielded 9,230 candidate publications. Applying rigorous screening criteria restricted the preliminary pool to 8,417 written-in-English, peer-reviewed articles. Subsequent abstract evaluation by two independent reviewers, calibrated across an initial benchmark sample of 100 abstracts, filtered the selection down to 1,253 relevant works. A second full-text evaluation prioritized empirical research grounded in field or laboratory data alongside rigorous secondary reviews, culminating in a definitive sample of 342 studies selected for detailed descriptive and qualitative thematic coding via NVivo software.
Methodological analysis of the 342 reviewed publications reveals a pronounced reliance on computational simulation and empirical experimentation within contemporary food security scholarship. Numerical modelling represents the single most dominant research approach across the corpus, accounting for 51.95 percent of all examined studies. Within this modelling domain, researchers predominantly implemented species distribution modelling and ecological niche modelling frameworks, deploying specialized algorithms including Maximum Entropy, generalized additive models, Dynamic Bioclimate Envelope Models, CLIMEX tools, and ensemble multi-model architectures. Direct empirical experiments constituted the second most frequent methodology at 16.01 percent of the literature, followed by quantitative statistical analyses relying on longitudinal panel data at 14.05 percent. Observational case studies represented 6.86 percent of the evidence base, while secondary reviews comprised 3.92 percent. Chronological publication trends demonstrated that academic inquiry into the climate-biodiversity-food security nexus expanded steadily after the early 2000s, reflecting growing scientific attention across journals spanning environmental science, climatology, agricultural agronomy, ecology, and marine biology.
Direct climatic variables documented across 273 studies primarily degrade food availability by undermining agricultural cultivation and animal husbandry outputs. Within this subset, 126 papers specifically analyzed production losses, identifying elevated surface temperatures, altered precipitation regimes, and heightened extreme weather events as primary causes of agricultural decline. Elevated temperatures and unpredictable rainfall intensify abiotic stress on plants and livestock, triggering elevated mortality rates once physiological tolerance thresholds are breached. Field evidence records substantial yield collapses in core cereal staples, most notably maize and wheat, caused by severe heat stress and in-field waterlogging. Livestock operations experience corresponding declines as elevated ambient temperatures induce fatal heat strokes and health disorders in cattle, while increased frequencies of rainy days facilitate the transmission of ruminant infectious diseases. Furthermore, extreme weather anomalies including severe floods, hurricanes, prolonged droughts, marine heatwaves, and sudden marine cold spells produce abrupt, immediate destruction across terrestrial farms, pastoral herds, and coastal fisheries.
Beyond immediate crop failure, climatic drivers generate severe indirect impacts through the geographic displacement and contraction of suitable environmental habitats. The synthesis identified 69 studies documenting habitat shifts forced by climatic change, including 41 investigations focused on commercial aquaculture and marine capture fisheries and 28 centered on terrestrial staple crops. Rising land surface temperatures and disrupted rainfall patterns account for 50 distinct pieces of evidence altering agroecological suitability for essential staples including potatoes, rice, maize, wheat, and the regionally significant perennial enset. In marine environments, 32 studies directly linked warmer surface and benthic waters to the displacement of commercial marine organisms, forcing fish and invertebrates to migrate poleward toward higher latitudes or vertically into deeper, cooler bathypelagic layers. These climate-induced migratory shifts directly affect commercially vital finfish and shellfish, including Atlantic cod, European seabass, Atlantic mackerel, American lobsters, squids, and swimming crabs. Compounding these spatial contractions, climatic variability disrupts organismal phenology, shortening growing cycles for winter wheat, interrupting essential winter dormancy periods in deciduous fruit orchards such as apples, pears, and cherries, and impairing seasonal recruitment dynamics in freshwater fisheries including walleye and yellow perch.
While 218 studies identified exclusively adverse climate impacts, the review catalogued 26 papers documenting localized or conditional positive effects stemming from climatic shifts. Nine studies highlighted instances where elevated atmospheric greenhouse gases stimulated crop vegetative development, primarily because elevated carbon dioxide concentrations enhance photosynthetic efficiency and water-use resilience in C3 photosynthetic plants such as rice, wheat, barley, and soybeans. Similarly, shifting thermal regimes occasionally create localized production opportunities, exemplified by projected northward and nearshore migrations of albacore tuna within the California Current system that could improve harvest access for coastal communities in the Pacific Northwest. In higher latitudes, retreating glaciers and diminishing sea-ice cover can open novel navigable fishing territories, while localized aridification may restrict the geographical prevalence of specific pathogens, such as Fusarium dry root rot in common beans or desert locust infestations. However, the authors emphasize that such regional gains are transient and frequently negated by widespread climate damage elsewhere, severe processing infrastructure deficits, or landscape fragmentation that prevents local producers from capitalizing on newly emergent agroecological conditions.
Climatic drivers exert parallel pressures on economic accessibility, nutritional utilization, and long-term stability across global food systems. Reduced harvest volumes and severe weather disasters undermine the financial viability of farming, livestock, and fishing households, directly impairing producer purchasing power. High-value cash crops including coffee, grapevine, and cacao suffer substantial productivity losses, while marine species migrations force fishing fleets to commit costly capital expenditures to travel further offshore without guaranteeing profitable catch returns. At the consumer level, climate-induced supply contractions drive sharp upward spikes in local and international food prices. Regarding nutritional utilisation, which remains an underexplored dimension represented by only 10 studies, elevated carbon dioxide levels systematically degrade food quality by reducing protein, essential mineral, and vitamin concentrations in cereal crops, potatoes, and leafy vegetables, while excessive heat during flowering restricts carbohydrate and starch accumulation. Additionally, marine environmental degradation distorts protein and lipid compositions in wild-caught seafood. In terms of long-term stability, 105 climate-projection modelling studies anticipate persistent supply volatility and structural production declines through 2050 and 2100 under high-emissions scenarios such as Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5, though ambitious global mitigation limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is projected to largely avert catastrophic yield losses.
Conversely, the synthesis of 72 studies evaluating biodiversity drivers reveals consistent contributions toward strengthening food production and safeguarding ecological support systems. The literature identifies significant yield gains achieved by leveraging species complementarity and agroecological synergies through crop rotation, intercropping, and integrated crop-livestock farming. Experimental investigations confirm that intercropping maximizes spatial resource efficiency, revitalizes depleted soil nutrients, and naturally suppresses agricultural pest populations. Belowground biological diversity plays a crucial role in maintaining soil fertility; symbiotic soil microorganisms, including plant-growth-promoting rhizobacteria, endophytic fungi such as Piriformospora indica in wheat, and Trichoderma strains in rapeseed, enhance root biomass, stimulate shoot photosynthesis, and confer plant drought tolerance. Soil macrofauna, particularly earthworms, engineer resilient soil structural aggregates, decompose organic matter, and increase bioavailable chemical elements such as soluble silicon, which bolsters crops against abiotic environmental stress. Agroforestry systems further stabilise surrounding microclimates, reduce groundwater recharge depletion, improve nitrogen fixation, curb wind and water erosion, and foster crucial natural pollination services and biological pest control mechanisms that reduce chemical pesticide reliance.
The beneficial role of biodiversity extends directly into household economic resilience, nutritional intake diversity, and risk mitigation against sudden environmental shocks. Incorporating diverse crop portfolios, maintaining agroforestry plots, and recycling crop residues as supplementary livestock fodder provides farming households with vital secondary revenue streams, buffering agricultural incomes against seasonal market fluctuations. Eleven documented case studies from remote, vulnerable communities demonstrate that adopting integrated biodiversity practices reliably elevates rural household incomes. Across nine studies addressing food utilisation, biodiversity drivers directly enhanced product quality and human nutrition. Inoculating soils with beneficial mycorrhizal fungi including Funneliformis mosseae, Septoglomus viscosum, and Rhizophagus irregularis significantly boosts sugar concentrations in fruit crops like strawberries. Furthermore, cultivating underutilized traditional crops, establishing biodiverse home gardens, harvesting edible insects, and foraging wild forest foods expand dietary variety and micronutrient consumption among food-insecure populations, while nearby forests supply crucial fuel wood for domestic food preparation. However, the authors caution that biodiversity interactions can also introduce severe agricultural risks, citing 31 studies where invasive alien plants, agricultural insect pests, toxic cyanobacteria blooms, and predatory marine species decimated harvest outputs and induced substantial mortality in aquaculture operations.
In synthesizing the overall state of the evidence, the authors identify critical thematic imbalances across the current literature and articulate strategic imperatives for subsequent empirical research and policy design. Contemporary scholarship remains heavily concentrated on the availability and accessibility dimensions of food security, leaving nutritional utilisation and long-term multi-decadal stability comparatively understudied. Moreover, empirical investigations of biodiversity drivers have focused disproportionately on smallholder communities in developing regions, underscoring an urgent need to evaluate how biodiversity conservation mechanisms can reinforce agricultural resilience within industrialized food systems in developed nations. Methodologically, the authors note that current ecological niche models often omit evolutionary adaptation rates, potentially overstating future crop vulnerabilities under high-emissions trajectories, while the review itself was bounded by its reliance on a single indexing database and a search window concluding in mid-2023. Ultimately, the systematic review highlights that future international food policies must transcend simple production quotas by formally integrating climate adaptation measures with targeted biodiversity conservation strategies to maintain global food security in the coming decades.
Subject of Research: Systematic literature review on the impacts of climate change and biodiversity drivers on global food security pillars
Article Title: What are the impacts of climate change and biodiversity on food security? A systematic literature review
Article References: Vu, N., Bourlakis, M., & Manikas, I. (2026). What are the impacts of climate change and biodiversity on food security? A systematic literature review. Agriculture & Food Security, 15(1), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40066-025-00585-6
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1186/s40066-025-00585-6
Keywords: food security, climate change, biodiversity, systematic literature review, agricultural production, marine fisheries, food systems, crop yields, impacts, climate, change, food
