Engineering resilient food systems in a warming world

Gastronomic scientist Alessandra Massa, at the Hill-Maini laboratory at Stanford University, holds up a culture of the edible fungus N eurospora intemerdia , grown on brewery waste, and a jar containing savoury miso paste made with this material. Credit: Franklin Lurie Beyond rising seas, displaced communities and disrupted livelihoods, climate change is increasingly threatening the foundations of food security. For every rise of 1 °C in the global mean surface temperature, there is an annual decrease in global food production equivalent to around 4.4% of the recommended daily consumption per person, according to a 2025 Nature analysis 1 . Nature Spotlight: Synthetic biology Increased soil salinity and other environmental stressors, such as drought and extreme temperatures, are key drivers of this trend, accounting for nearly half of the global crop-yield losses each year. In low-lying areas such as coastal Bangladesh, climate change has been implicated in an uptick in cyclones, rising sea levels and extreme seasonal weather. As a result, millions of hectares of arable land in the country have been damaged, contributing to a decline from a peak of 9.6 million hectares in 1989 to 7.9 million in 2023. Since the 1970s, the pace of climate change has nearly doubled. Reports suggest that Earth is now warming by around 0.35 ºC per decade . …