Vulnerability to high temperature shapes global warming impacts on rice yield
- Yiwei Jian
- Xuhui Wang
- Jonas Jägermeyr
- Philippe Ciais
- Christoph Müller
- Jakob Zscheischler
- Tao Li
- Kun Cheng
- Pengfu Hou
- Jianliang Huang
- Shan Huang
- Yu Jiang
- Bin Wang
- Zhenwei Song
- Zuolin Zhang
- Peng Zhu
- Feng Zhou
2026-07-29
Complex and spatially varying warming impacts on rice yield hinder climate change impact assessments on food security. To address this issue, we compiled a global dataset of field-warming experiments ( n = 214) and analyzed stage-specific crop responses to temperature variations. Results show that exposures to high (30° to 35°C) and extreme high (>35°C) temperatures are the dominant drivers of warming-induced rice yield losses, primarily through harvest index reductions. One additional exposure day above 30°C during the reproductive stage reduces rice yields by 1.1 to 1.8%. In contrast, current global gridded crop models underestimate this sensitivity, simulating only 0.1 to 1.3% yield loss per exposure day. After adjusting the model biases, we estimate that global rice yield losses decrease by 8.1% under 1°C of global warming, approximately twice the unadjusted estimates, with South and Southeast Asia being the most vulnerable regions. Our results highlight the critical role of high-temperature exposure in shaping warming impacts on rice yield.