Climate change threatens food security through cascading production and nutritional vulnerabilities: a comprehensive review

Abstract

This comprehensive review synthesizes the multifaceted mechanisms through which climate change erodes food and nutrition security across global systems. Particularly, climate stressors destabilize crop production through extreme weather events, shifting rainfall patterns, and accelerated phenological development, while simultaneously disrupting marine food webs through warming and acidification. Simultaneously, environmental degradation undermines agricultural foundations via soil health decline, water scarcity, pollinator collapse, and biodiversity loss. In addition, nutrient dilution from elevated atmospheric CO2, heat-induced compromises in livestock and fish quality, multiplying food safety hazards, and escalating post-harvest losses collectively diminish nutritional outcomes. Moreover, price volatility, disrupted distribution networks, and climate-induced migration further destabilize food access for vulnerable populations. Accordingly, this review provides a unified framework linking production disruptions, environmental degradation, and socioeconomic instability to reveal how climate change creates cascading vulnerabilities across the entire food system. To this end, addressing these interconnected threats requires integrated solutions spanning climate-smart agriculture, resource restoration, supply chain transformation, inclusive governance, and innovation partnerships. Finally, without decisive action that tackles production losses, ecological degradation, and structural inequities simultaneously, climate change will relentlessly widen the gap between food supply and nutritional demand.