Multi-hazard exposure and vulnerability drive rising agricultural risk in global breadbasket regions

Abstract Climate extremes increasingly threaten global food production, yet global multi-hazard agricultural risk assessments that jointly consider multiple hazards, crop exposure and socioeconomic vulnerability are still missing. This gap limits our ability to identify where climate shocks to croplands are most likely to translate into high agricultural risk. Here we present a global agricultural risk assessment that quantifies the exposure of croplands and ten major crop groups to heatwaves, droughts, floods and compound hot–dry events, and combines this with a vulnerability index constructed from socio-economic and institutional indicators using latent factor modelling. Using ensembles of climate and hydrological models under multiple future scenarios, we show widespread increases in multi-hazard exposure, with the strongest intensification across South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and major U.S. and European breadbaskets. A significant relationship between vulnerability and cropland exposure emerges in future scenarios but is absent historically, indicating a growing role for vulnerability in shaping future agricultural risk. These results demonstrate that reliably identifying future agricultural risk hotspots requires jointly accounting for multi-hazard exposure and socioeconomic vulnerability, so that adaptation efforts can be targeted to regions where intensifying extremes coincide with high vulnerability.