Climate Change Threatens the Future of Food Supply Chains

As climate change has intensified, extreme weather events, shifting temperatures and unpredictable rainfall have disrupted global food supply chains, threatening the stability of everything from staple crops to the cans on supermarket shelves.

In the years to come, the effects of climate change on the price and availability for a variety of foods are going to be substantial, says food scientist Dr. Bryan Quoc Le. 

“It’s going to be more difficult to grow anything,” he warns, using natural vanilla as just one example, of which the vast majority comes from Madagascar. There, the increasing frequency of tropical cyclones has devastated farms in recent years. “As weather patterns become more erratic, harvests will continue to dwindle or experience unpredictable supply over the coming years.” Le says that longer summers and shorter winters brought on by rising global temperatures are also likely to make blights and pestilence far more common, given that winter can be a critical period for killing off pests sensitive to colder weather.

Already in 2025, we’ve seen the direct and indirect impacts of climate change on the price and availability of essential foods. In the U.S., extreme weather across the country led to a shift in the migratory patterns of birds, exacerbating the spread of avian flu, and eventually driving egg prices to record levels, as farms were forced to cull millions of egg-laying hens. In Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana — where 60% of the world’s cocoa is produced — months of unseasonably dry weather saw global cocoa production fall by 14% in the 2023-24 growing period, causing Oreo parent company Mondelēz International to warn of “unprecedented cost inflation…