Climate Risk in Agriculture: An Integrative Review of Assessment, Impacts, Adaptation, and Institutions

Few economic sectors are as exposed to climate variability and change as agriculture, and global food demand is still rising. Assessing agricultural climate risk is challenging because studies examine different impacts across spatial and temporal scales, limiting direct comparison. This integrative review organizes the literature around that problem in five domains. Climate risk arises when a physical hazard acts on exposed and vulnerable farms, crops, or people. It is not the same as the hazard itself, the realized impact, or resilience. Assessment methods range from crop models, statistical and threshold-based approaches, and spatial maps to surveys and financial metrics, and they are applied from the household to the continental scale under observed or future climatic conditions. Impacts extend from yield and livestock losses to lower farm income, weaker credit quality, and reduced food access, and they include compound heat–drought and flood sequences. Farmers’ decisions depend on risk perception, risk tolerance, and access to labor, finance, water, and information. Responses include agronomic adjustments, climate-smart practices, insurance, credit, and, when incremental measures prove insufficient, broader changes to production systems. Whether these responses can be scaled up depends on policy, public capacity, climate services, and spatial targeting. Rather than pooling heterogeneous effect sizes or ranking practices globally, this review identifies differences in empirical metrics and bottlenecks that constrain farm-level implementation.