Warning of Superbugs, Groups Urge Trump EPA to Ban Use of Important Human Drugs as Pesticides

“Each year Americans are at greater risk from dangerous bacteria and diseases because human medicines are sprayed on crops,” one expert said, calling out industry for the “recklessness and preventable suffering.”


Jean Lee, a PhD student at the Doherty Institute, inspects the superbug Staphylococcus epidermidis on an agar plate in Melbourne, Australia.
(Photo by William West/AFP via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Nov 24, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

Just a month after the head of the World Health Organization warned that “antimicrobial resistance is outpacing advances in modern medicine, threatening the health of families worldwide,” a coalition of conservation, farmworker, and public health groups on Monday petitioned the Trump administration to ban the use of crucial drugs as pesticides.

The legal petition provides a list of “active ingredients that are themselves, or whose use can promote cross-resistance to, medically important antibiotics/antifungals,” and requests that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cancel registrations under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act of all products that contain them.

“Research is clear that the use of antibiotics and antifungals as pesticides poses a threat to public health because it contributes to the evolution of pathogens that are resistant to medicine,” the petition states, referring to what are often called “superbugs.”

“Petitioners make this request because of the critical nature of these drugs and drug classes to human and veterinary medicine, along with scientifically established concerns related to increasing resistance and declining efficacy rates as a result of prophylactic and other uses of these antimicrobials outside of the medical field,” the filing continues.

“More than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur in the United States each year, resulting in more than 35,000 deaths.”

Noting that the use of antibiotic pesticides also “directly threatens the well-being of humans and animals through contamination of food supplies and crops,” the filing adds that “petitioners believe that the most effective way to safeguard human and environmental health is to disallow the use of these ingredients in pesticide products.”

The petitioners are the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at George Washington University, Californians for Pesticide Reform, Center for Environmental Health, Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Food Safety, CRLA Foundation, Friends of the Earth US, Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network, UNI Center for Energy & Environmental Education, and US Public Interest Research Group.

“Each year Americans are at greater risk from dangerous bacteria and diseases because human medicines are sprayed on crops,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement. “This kind of recklessness and preventable suffering is what happens when the industry has a stranglehold on the EPA’s pesticide-approval process.”

Donley and other campaigners have previously called out the Trump administration for spouting pesticide companies’ talking points in the September Make America Healthy Again report, installing an ex-industry lobbyist in a key EPA post, and doubling down on herbicides including dicamba and atrazine—the latter of which is commonly used on corn, sugarcane, and sorghum in the United States, and last week was labeled probably carcinogenic to humans by a WHO agency.

Underscoring the urgent need for EPA action, the new petition highlights that “more than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur in the United States each year, resulting in more than 35,000 deaths,” according to a 2019 report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Citing another CDC report, the filing points out that “the Covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated the issue due to longer hospital stays and increased inappropriate antibiotic use, leading to an upsurge in the number of bacterial antibiotic-resistant hospital-onset infections by 20%.”

Globally, antimicrobial resistance “has increased in 40% of the pathogen-antibiotic combinations monitored for global temporal trends between 2018 and 2023, with annual relative increases ranging from 5% to 15%,” according to the WHO analysis released last month. By the end of that period, “approximately 1 in 6 laboratory-confirmed bacterial infections worldwide were caused by bacteria resistant to antibiotics.”

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed that “we must use antibiotics responsibly, and make sure everyone has access to the right medicines, quality-assured diagnostics, and vaccines. Our future also depends on strengthening systems to prevent, diagnose, and treat infections and on innovating with next-generation antibiotics and rapid point-of-care molecular tests.”

Libcom.orglibcom.org/article/our-synthetic-environment-murray-bookchin

Our Synthetic Environment - Murray Bookchin - Libcom.org

Dec 11, 2014 ... Our Synthetic Environment is a 1962 book by Murray Bookchin, published under the pseudonym "Lewis Herber".

Silentspring.orgsilentspring.org/about-us/our-story/legacy-rachel-carson-0

The Legacy of Rachel Carson | Silent Spring Institute

Rachel Carson was a pioneering scientist, writer, and advocate who changed the way Americans think about the environment and human health.

Uniteddiversity.cooplibrary.uniteddiversity.coop/More_Books_and_Reports/Silent_Spring-Rachel_Carson-1962.pdf

Silent Spring - United Diversity Library

RACHEL CARSON. Page 8. Foreword. IN 1958, when Rachel Carson undertook to write the book that became Silent Spring, she was fifty years old. She had spent most ...

Fao.orgwww.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/library/pdf/Silent_spring.pdf

Silent_spring.pdf

few months between the New Yorker's serialization of Silent. Spring in June and its publication in book form that September,. Rachel Carson's alarm touched off ...

Trump’s Environmental Policy Is Determined to “Make America Poisoned Again”

Trump has taken a wrecking ball to environmental regulation. Who benefits?

INTERVIEW

By C.J. Polychroniou ,

Truthout

November 18, 2025

Flames and smoke rise from the Chevron refinery in El Segundo, California, 

on October 2, 2025.

DAVID PASHAEE / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images


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In 2020, Noam Chomsky raised eyebrows by declaring Donald Trump “the worst criminal in human history” on account of the fact that, as president of the most powerful nation in the world, he was pursuing environmental policies that would lead to the destruction of “organized life on earth.” That statement was made during Trump’s first presidency. The second Trump presidency is now much worse. In the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows, world-renowned economist and environmental policy expert James K. Boyce unravels Trump’s ideological stance and catastrophic policies on climate and the environment during his second term in the White House — but also argues that the future still depends on us. Boyce is professor emeritus of economics and senior fellow of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of many books and the recipient of the 2024 Global Inequality Research Award and the 2017 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.

C. J. Polychroniou: Trump’s second-term environmental policies, which include significant weakening and even elimination of environmental safeguards, canceling funds for clean energy projects, and firing hundreds of climate specialists, are proving to be far more extreme and dangerous than his first. Can you make sense of the rationale behind these reckless policies? Is it purely economic reasoning or the enforcement of an ideological agenda in reaction to green activism?

James K. Boyce: I think it’s both. There are short-term economic benefits to some of Trump’s corporate backers, and I suppose you can call this “economic reasoning” — if you’re thinking not about the well-being of the country but about their bottom lines. But there’s an ideological agenda at play too: words like “green” and even “climate” are regarded by many Trump supporters as smokescreens for elite privilege and government overreach.

The payoff for the fossil fuel companies has been evident. In April 2024, at a dinner for top oil and gas executives that he hosted at his Mar-a-Lago club, Trump reportedly asked them to contribute $1 billion to his election campaign, saying it would be a “deal” in light of what they would get back when he was elected. The companies contributed only $75 million in the end, according to a New York Times analysis. But in less than a year the Trump administration has rolled out $18 billion in new subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. These come on top of billions in pre-existing subsidies. The administration has also cut $6 billion from royalties that companies pay for oil and gas extraction on public lands. By any measure, the industry has reaped a very generous return on its investment.

Ideologically, what we are seeing today has some overlaps with the traditional “small government” agenda of right-wing libertarians who chafed at government regulation — a strand of conservatism as concerned about power as profits. The decimation of government services and many agency budgets is in line with this tradition. But at the same time, we are seeing lavish handouts to favored sectors like fossil fuels and a metastatic growth of state power in domains like immigration and the control of academia. The downsizing of some functions of the state is fused with its aggrandizement in other respects. What holds this bundle together is a war against the “other,” where “other” includes foreigners, minorities, and “woke” elites. What we’re seeing is the emergence of a mean state, not a small state.

Related Story

Trump’s Coal-Friendly EPA Rolls Back Rules Meant to Prevent Water Contamination
The move delays base-level reporting and monitoring, and actual cleanup will be punted even further into the future. By Schuyler Mitchell , Truthout July 23, 2025

Shockingly enough, the Trump administration has rolled back limits on PFAS chemicals, which are linked to cancer and immune dysfunction. Why would Trump engage in an all-out assault on chemical regulations? Is it because the chemical industry is allegedly a struggling sector?

The rollback of rules on PFAS “forever chemicals” in drinking water is only one front in a broader assault on environmental protection. It is part and parcel of the Trump administration’s policy of Making America Poisoned Again. This is driven primarily by across-the-board antipathy to regulations and the agencies that administer them, not by the impacts of specific rules on corporate balance sheets. For the moment, U.S. chemical manufacturers are in good shape relative to their European competitors by virtue of access to cheap natural gas and petroleum, the feedstocks for many products. Chemical manufacturers in China and India similarly have received a boost from discounted prices for Russian oil and gas due to the Ukraine war sanctions.

The U.S. is lagging behind Europe, however, in terms of chemicals innovation, and this bodes ill for its competitiveness in years ahead. The innovation gap in part reflects different regulatory environments. The European Union’s REACH Regulation requires companies to test existing products and encourages them to come up with less toxic alternatives. U.S. regulation under the Toxics Substances Control Act mandates testing for new chemicals but continues allowing old ones into the market by exempting them from the same scrutiny, with the perverse result that innovation is discouraged.

The costs of hazardous emissions are inflicted disproportionately on minority and low-income communities, sparing communities with greater political influence. This makes it easier for this administration to gut environmental protection. Indifference to the human costs of its policy decisions — when the humans in question are the wrong sort — is a hallmark of the meanness agenda being pursued by key Trump officials.

Trump has withdrawn support for research that mentions “climate,” called wind and solar the “scam of the century,” and blamed renewable energy for rising electricity prices. I don’t think he is unaware of the risks of climate change, although he has ignored every warning about the climate crisis and continues to use the “flood the zone with shit” strategy for the environment. Be that as it may, can one man stop the energy transition?

The short answer is “No.” But he can do a lot of damage in the meantime.

The cost of renewable energy has fallen quickly, faster than most observers predicted a few years ago. Solar, wind, and battery storage together will account for 93 percent of new electricity generation capacity added in the U.S. this year. The Trump administration’s manipulation of subsidies and regulations in favor of fossil fuels will delay the advance of renewables but not halt it.

Meanwhile, the energy transition is gathering momentum in the rest of world. Clean energy is now estimated to account for one-quarter of China’s economic growth. It is no more likely that the U.S. economy will still have a fossil fuel-based economy at the close of this century than it was that we’d be driving horses and buggies at the end of the last one. The difference is that the U.S. led the transportation revolution of the 20th century, whereas today it seems determined to bring up the rear.

It is vital to understand that every extra ton of carbon emissions is more damaging than the ton before. In the language of economics, their marginal cost is rising. This means it is never “too late” to take action on climate change. The climate crisis is not like a cliff — once you fall off, it’s game over. Instead, it is an ongoing cascade of damages that rise exponentially over time. The longer we delay the clean energy transition, the worse the extreme weather events will become, and the more urgent the need for mitigation and adaptation.

Geopolitical conflicts increase carbon emissions, hinder climate action, and jeopardize global sustainability. How would you assess the likely convergence of geopolitics and climate change in the 21st century?

That’s a big question, and an unsettling one. Broadly we can envision two polar-opposite scenarios: in the first, the people of the world come together to address the global challenge of climate destabilization; in the second, we come apart in fighting over what remains on a damaged planet.

Which scenario prevails will depend on balances of power between those who benefit from the status quo and those who bear the costs, and on whether those with more power feel compassion for others or regard them as less than fully human. The impacts of climate change and war are terribly unequal: it is the poorest people within countries, and the poorest countries in the world, that are most at risk from both. The choice before humankind is between a politics of belonging and a politics of cruelty.

Dehumanization of others is the oldest trick in the playbook of bullies and tyrants. Anyone who recalls their early teenage school years will know that the mean kids were the ones who told others they did not belong.

The meanness agenda at home has its foreign-policy counterpart in wars abroad. Xenophobia is a fertile breeding ground for imperialism. Yet the triumph of cruelty politics is by no means certain.

Today many voters in the United States are deeply disillusioned with foreign wars. The costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in Vietnam before them, were terrible not only for the people of those countries but also for the U.S., distorting the nation’s economy and sacrificing the health and lives of its soldiers. A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that 64 percent of U.S. military veterans believe that the war in Iraq was not worth fighting. Ironically, it was Trump rather than the Democrats who tapped into the public’s aversion to more “forever wars.”

Another reason to be hopeful is that it is hard to demonize others when you interact with them as real people. Detentions and deportations of immigrants in the United States are provoking a backlash because so many of the victims are friends and neighbors.

Most importantly, the overwhelming majority of people throughout the world today share the experience of watching the rich get richer, flaunting their wealth while working families struggle to make ends meet. The recent mayoral election in New York City points to the political salience of this great economic divide. It offers hope that working people can overcome differences of background and belief to unite for a more fair and just economic order.

As we confront the choice between a politics of belonging and a politics of cruelty, there is no question which will be better for humankind. But it is an open question which will win the day. Neither is inevitable. The future depends on all of us.

A Month After Trump Doubles Down on Atrazine, WHO Dubs It ‘Probably Carcinogenic to Humans’

“It is outrageously irresponsible that we still allow use of this dangerous poison in the United States,” said the Center for Biological Diversity’s environmental health science director.

A tractor equipped with a sprayer applies a pre-plant herbicide to a field before planting a corn crop in Mississippi 
(Photo by Debra Ferguson/Design Pics Editorial/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Nov 21, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

Just a month after the Trump administration doubled down on the alleged safety of atrazine, a United Nations agency said on Friday that the pesticide—which is banned by dozens of countries but commonly used on corn, sugarcane, and sorghum in the United States—probably causes cancer.

“It is outrageously irresponsible that we still allow use of this dangerous poison in the United States,” said Nathan Donley, the Center for Biological Diversity’s environmental health science director, in a Friday statement. “This finding is just the latest indictment of the industry-controlled US pesticide oversight process that is failing to protect people and wildlife from chemicals linked to numerous health harms.”

Research into and alarm over atrazine have mounted since the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer initially concluded in 1999 that it was not classifiable as carcinogenic to humans. IACR has now announced new findings for atrazine and alachlor, another herbicide widely used on crops, as well as the agricultural fungicide vinclozolin.

Of the three, only atrazine was previously examined by IARC. From October 28 to November 4, a working group of 22 international experts from a dozen countries met in France to evaluate the carcinogenicity of pesticides. They classified vinclozolin as “possibly carcinogenic to humans, and both alachlor and atrazine as ”probably carcinogenic to humans.“

The latter two decisions were based on a combination of limited evidence for cancer in humans, sufficient evidence for cancer in animals, and strong mechanistic evidence in experimental systems. IARC said that “for atrazine, positive associations have been observed for non-Hodgkin lymphoma that is positive for the chromosomal translocation t(14;18).”




A couple of weeks before that IARC meeting, the Trump administration sparked outrage with a US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) draft opinion claiming that atrazine does not pose an extinction risk to a single protected animal or plant.

That draft opinion came as President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were already under fire for the second Make America Healthy Again report. After the first MAHA publication noted concerns regarding pesticides, even naming atrazine, agribusiness lobbyists confronted the administration, and the following document ultimately featured pesticide industry talking points.

The second report’s “only mention of pesticides is an Orwellian promise to ensure ‘confidence in EPA’s robust pesticide review procedures’—procedures courts have repeatedly found unlawful and that frontline communities know cannot be trusted,” the Center for Food Safety said after its September release. “Instead, it says that it will speed up pesticide approval and it will ‘partner’ with the pesticide industry to ‘educate’ the public about the ‘robust review’ of EPA’s regulation of pesticides to provide the public with ‘confidence.’”

Then came the USFWS draft, which Center for Food Safety senior attorney Sylvia Wu said “makes clear that despite the rhetoric of MAHA, there will be no robust review of the dangers of pesticides by the Trump administration... Instead, a toxic poison like atrazine will continue to contaminate our lands and waters, making our children sick for decades to come.”

Wu’s group has long been critical of atrazine. During the first Trump administration, it was part of a coalition that sued over the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 2020 reapproval of the herbicide. So was the Center for Biological Diversity—which was also angered by the USFWS document, with Donley calling it “an absolute joke.”

Donley took aim at the Trump administration again on Friday, after IACR announced its new classification for atrazine.

“Despite its rhetoric to the contrary, there is no better friend of atrazine than the Trump administration,” he said. “Hiding behind the rhetoric of MAHA, EPA reapproval of a poison that’s likely to keep Americans sick for generations is moving ahead full steam.”

Libcom.orgfiles.libcom.org/files/Bookchin M. Our Synthetic Environment.pdf

Our Synthetic Environment - Libcom.org

Modern agriculture may be distinguished from earlier forms of cultivation by its reliance on chemistry for soil nutrients and the control of insect infestations ...

 

Arkansas research awarded for determining cardinal temps for eight cover crops

New information offers better guidance for cover crop growth models

University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture

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image: 

Research at the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station determined the cardinal temperatures — base, optimal and maximum — of eight cover crops, including crimson clover.

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Credit: U of A System Division of Agriculture photo by Mila Pessotto

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Knowing what temperatures that a plant can withstand is a hallmark of botanical science, but those temperatures had not been well documented for many cover crops.

Grown in periods of the year when the cash crop is absent, cover crops are planted for erosion control, as well as weed suppression and to improve soil structure, moisture retention and nutrient cycling. They also provide habitat for beneficial insects and can serve as forage for farm animals.

Without knowledge of the cover crops’ base, optimal and maximum temperature ranges —known as cardinal temperatures — agricultural scientists could not develop accurate plant growth and biomass prediction models, which help farmers optimize decisions like when to terminate the cover crop. The models also help assess weed suppression, estimate nutrient cycling and quantify the benefits of soil carbon and potential negative impacts of a cover crop.

A team of researchers with the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, led by Trent Roberts, professor of soil fertility and soil testing and Endowed Chair in Soil Fertility Research in the crop, soil and environmental sciences department, took on the problem by evaluating eight commonly grown cover crop species in growth chambers to find their cardinal temperatures.

The base temperature is the lowest temperature at which the plant will still exhibit a measurable growth rate. Optimal is where plant growth is at its peak, and maximum is the temperature at which plant growth ceases due to excessive heat. For many plant species, the relationship between temperature and growth rate or developmental stage can be correlated and predicted using mathematical models. 

Not only did the researchers identify the base temperatures for two cover crop species and the optimum temperatures for three of the eight cover crop species for the first time, they also determined the maximum temperature values of all eight cover crops, which included crimson clover, Austrian winter pea, balansa clover, barley, black-seeded oats, common vetch, cereal rye, crimson clover and hairy vetch.

Estimates were required for maximum temperatures of five of the cover crop species due to the 34 Celsius upper limits of the growth chamber. Although maximum temperatures may not be as critical for growth modeling as the base and optimum temperatures, the researchers pointed out that knowledge of the maximum temps may be more crucial in the Mid-South and Southern states, where temperatures can rise quickly in late winter and early spring.

In all, they offered 14 newly identified cardinal temperatures for the eight cover crop species. Five cardinal temperatures determined in the study were different from what was previously recorded and three of the base temperature values were found to differ from previously reported values, including cereal rye, which was almost 9 degrees Celsius lower than the previously reported value in the scientific literature.

“Such a large difference in base temperature values would lead to gross underestimations of plant growth and development for cereal rye when using the data reported in the literature," said Roberts, whose role includes research and outreach work through the Division of Agriculture’s Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension Service.

Mila Pessotto, Ph.D., was the lead author of the research article titled “Determining Cardinal Temperatures for Eight Cover Crop Species” as a masters student in the crop, soil and environmental sciences department of the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences at the University of Arkansas.

“The refinement or identification of 18 of the 24 possible cardinal temperatures investigated in this study generates a significant step forward in the ability to model cover crop species growth and development,” Pessotto said.

Tri Societies Recognition

The work, originally published in 2023, recently earned Pessotto and her collaborators a 2025 Outstanding Paper Award from the American science societies for crop, soil and agronomy.

The American Society of Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America, and the Soil Science Society of America — also known as the Tri Societies — recognize outstanding publications from their journals each year based on advancement of knowledge in the profession, effectiveness of communication, methodology, originality and impact.

Co-authors of the study included Roberts, Mary Savin, professor and horticulture department head, Matt Bertucci, assistant professor of sustainable fruit and vegetable production in the horticulture department, Jeremy Ross, professor and extension soybean agronomist, and Caio dos Santos, who received a master’s degree from the University of Arkansas in 2020.

Pessotto is now a postdoc research associate in the department of agronomy at Iowa State University, where dos Santos also recently earned his doctorate.

The study was supported with funding and technical assistance from the Arkansas Corn and Grain Sorghum Board and the Arkansas Soybean Promotion Board.

To learn more about the Division of Agriculture research, visit the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station website. Follow us on X at @ArkAgResearch, subscribe to the Food, Farms and Forests podcast and sign up for our monthly newsletter, the Arkansas Agricultural Research Report. To learn more about the Division of Agriculture, visit uada.edu. Follow us on X at @AgInArk. To learn about extension programs in Arkansas, contact your local Cooperative Extension Service agent or visit uaex.uada.edu.

About the Division of Agriculture

The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture’s mission is to strengthen agriculture, communities, and families by connecting trusted research to the adoption of best practices. Through the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Cooperative Extension Service, the Division of Agriculture conducts research and extension work within the nation’s historic land grant education system. 

The Division of Agriculture is one of 20 entities within the University of Arkansas System. It has offices in all 75 counties in Arkansas and faculty on three system campuses.  

Pursuant to 7 CFR § 15.3, the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture offers all its Extension and Research programs and services (including employment) without regard to race, color, sex, national origin, religion, age, disability, marital or veteran status, genetic information, sexual preference, pregnancy or any other legally protected status, and is an equal opportunity institution.

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DOI

10.1002/agg2.20393 

UNDP warns climate change will slash crop yields in low-income countries

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By bne IntelliNews November 14, 2025

A new United Nations dataset warns that climate change will significantly erode agricultural productivity by the end of the century, posing severe risks to global food security and disproportionately harming countries already struggling to adapt.

The findings, released through the Human Climate Horizons (HCH) data platform by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in collaboration with the Climate Impact Lab, indicate that more than 90% of assessed countries are likely to experience falling yields of staple crops, even after accounting for farmers’ adaptation measures.

According to the analysis, 161 of the 176 countries studied are projected to suffer declining yields of key food crops, including maize, rice, wheat, soy, cassava and sorghum.

Low-income and low-development countries are expected to be hardest hit. “The data show that the world’s poorest countries face some of the steepest losses in agricultural productivity, with median national crop yields projected to decline by around 25-30% by the end of the century under very high emissions,” UNDP said.

Regions in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia are particularly exposed because agriculture depends heavily on rainfall rather than irrigation and because farmers often lack access to finance, technology, or resilient crop varieties. 

But the report also finds major agricultural exporters are not immune. The world’s “breadbasket” economies — large wheat and soy producers — are projected to see declines of up to 40% under severe warming scenarios, raising the prospect of volatility in global food markets.

“Climate change is not just an environmental challenge — it is a profound development crisis,” said Pedro Conceição, director of the UNDP’s Human Development Report Office. “High agricultural yields are important not just for food security, they also sustain livelihoods and open pathways for economic diversification and prosperity. Threats to agricultural yields are threats to human development today and in the future.”

The new projections assess two climate trajectories: one assuming moderate emissions reductions and one assuming emissions remain high throughout the century. The data span more than 19,000 subnational regions across more than 100 countries, covering three time periods — near term (2020–2039), mid-century (2040–2059) and late century (2080–2099). Some of the regions set to be worst affected include parts of China, India and Myanmar. 

The UNDP said the scale and granularity of the dataset offer one of the clearest pictures to date of how a warming climate could reshape global food systems. The findings reinforce calls by developing countries and civil society groups to prioritise food systems in climate negotiations.

The projections also show that reducing emissions significantly limits damage. Under moderate emissions pathways, crop losses by 2100 are less than half of those anticipated under high-emissions scenarios — a trend consistent across both high- and low-income countries.

“The pathway to a sustainable and equitable future lies in human-centred climate action,” Conceição said. “Ensuring that every person retains access to sufficient, nutritious, and reliable food is not only a matter of survival — it is a cornerstone of human dignity and development.”

The Human Climate Horizons initiative provides open-access, evidence-based projections on climate impacts across multiple sectors, including labour productivity, coastal exposure, and mortality risks. The platform aims to support policymakers ahead of increasing climate negotiations pressure and food system instability.