What food and drink will the UK grow as temperatures rise?

It’s been a blisteringly hot year. Spring was the warmest since records began in 1884 according to the Met Office, with the mean temperature 1.4°C higher than the UK long-term average. It was the sunniest: with 653.3 hours of sunshine – 43% above average. And it is punishingly dry: the driest in more than a century in England. June continued the trend – England registered its warmest on record. July has also been unusually warm and sunny. And another heatwave is forecast for August.

But this is the new normal. Indeed it’s only going to get hotter, for longer. A June study by the Met Office estimates a 50/50 chance of another 40°C day in the UK (the first ever was in Lincolnshire in 2022) in the next 12 years. “Far higher temperatures – over 45°C – and more sustained heatwaves may be possible,” the authors warn.

Already the changing climate is impacting UK food production. Last year England suffered its second worst harvest on record, according to Defra data. It was “a shocker, and climate change is to blame” says non-profit the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit. “Climate change is the biggest threat to UK food security.”

By 2070, UK summers are projected to be up to 5.1°C warmer and 60% drier, the Met Office states. With them, a demand for profound changes in how and what we grow and eat in the UK will surely follow.

UK-made marmalade

Mandarins from Tyne & Wear, Mexican avocados from Cumbria and Devonshire okra. Just some of the high-potential future UK crops uncovered by modelling earlier this year in a major study led by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH). The research took a database of more than 160 food crops – encompassing the minimum and maximum temperatures at which they can survive, their water needs, soil preferences and so on – and measured their suitability for growing across every square kilometre of the UK under a 2°C and 4°C warming scenario.

Several crops not currently widely grown in the UK saw their suitability score in a warmer UK soar, with sunflower, durum wheat, soybeans, cowpeas, chickpeas, citrus fruit and okra among the best suited.

“A lot of the crops that currently do well under a more Mediterranean climate are likely to become more suitable in the in the UK,” explains lead author Dr John Redhead, a spatial ecologist at UKCEH. “It could mean home-produced houmous, tofu and marmalade are a common sight on our supermarket shelves by 2080.”

Already, some enterprising growers are getting ahead of the thermometer. There are now 1,104 vineyards in the UK with plantings up 510% since 2005, according to the Food Standards Agency, as climate change makes production more prosperous. In 2019, British-grown pulses, grains and seed brand Hodmedod’s harvested Britain’s first commercial chickpea harvest in Norfolk. It’s also pursuing lentils and common beans as viable future staples. All three are “associated with warmer climates and are marginal in our climate” explains co-founder Josiah Meldrum.

The challenge in adopting new crops is significant. Lentils “we’ve almost cracked” with now “fairly reliable harvests” from a small group of farmers, Meldrum says. But common beans and chickpeas “remain incredibly tricky”.

“When the chickpeas have gone well they’ve gone incredibly well – matching global yield potential and tasting superb,” he says. “But this year none of the farmers we’re working with drilled chickpeas – last year was terrible and we all lost our nerve a little.”

“A warming climate helps on paper, but the extraordinary instability in the weather that comes with warming doesn’t,” Meldrum adds.

Winners and losers

Plant by plant, Redhead and his team had been “expecting to see a bunch of really clear winners and losers”.

There are certainly some clear losers. Under a 2°C warming scenario, for example, the UK’s most productive arable regions, the south east and East Anglia, become significantly less suitable for wheat and strawberries. And at 4°C other major crops, including onions and oats, suffer too.

But reassuringly, the majority of crops currently grown in the UK see their suitability “stay relatively stable or increase” when still grown within these shores. The data shows a “big polarisation” where the south east of England becomes a much more brutal environment for agriculture and the north and west far more fertile. In other words, we can mostly still grow what we’re used to, but just the location will need to change.

“Climate change isn’t a shift from one steady state to another warmer one. It’s a move to a chaotic future that may take thousands of years to settle”

Josiah Meldrum, Hodmedod

On the face of it, that doesn’t sound too disruptive. If anything, a more delicious and diverse future awaits. But it’s not as breezy as it first sounds.

“You could be really optimistic and say, well, for the UK as a whole we’re all right,” Redhead says. “But clearly, it’s unlikely to be feasible just to switch large-scale food production from Britain’s agricultural heartlands of south east England to Scotland, for example. Our UK crop systems have evolved over centuries to match our landscapes and the areas where we grow most of those major crops – particularly wheat, sugar beet, potatoes – are those areas that are going to be worse under climate change.”

Take the West Country. It’s climatically ideal for several crops under the warming scenarios, but “it’s hilly, it’s got smaller fields, grass grows well there so we have livestock farming” Redhead says. “There’s a lot of history and culture which you would have to change for the West Country to become a region where we’re growing more arable crops and more fruit & veg.”

At the same time, areas of increased suitability for those displaced crops currently grow other food.

“Take land along the east coast of Scotland, a lot of it currently geared towards growing barley for the whisky industry. So if you want to move some of your other crops up there, what’s going to happen to that industry?” Redhead says.

Shifting production geographically, then, isn’t as straightforward as simply sowing a different seed somewhere.

“A food system is built around roads and railway lines, ports and infrastructure. You need people to pick, processing facilities, expertise,” says Paul Gilding, from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. “There are all these moving parts – it’s not just the theoretical capacity to produce food. Can you buy and sell it for the right price in the right place at the right time? We produce enough food in the world today but still people starve.”

To change where things are grown, “you have to change all that infrastructure too” agrees Redhead.

“We’ve geared our agricultural systems over several hundreds of years to land that’s been best suited historically for growing different crops,” he adds. “All our agronomic knowledge and our investment in processing infrastructure and transport infrastructure is built around growing particular crops in particular places.”

Where crops are grown today is a result of centuries of trial and error to find optimum spots based on regional and local climates. Plants and growers don’t just need a yearly mean average amount of sun and water but certain conditions at certain times of year. A hotter UK will also only be one of many weather extremes, with increased likelihood of heavy rainfall and droughts at key moments in a growing season.

“It’s critically important we understand that climate change isn’t a shift from one steady state to another warmer one,” says Meldrum. “It’s instead a move from 20,000 years of broadly stable climate that nurtured agriculture and gave us civilisation, to a chaotic future that may take thousands of years to settle into new more stable patterns.”

Survival spuds

As well as exploring the need to move production, scientists are pursuing more heat-resilient crops that can survive longer heatwaves and higher temperatures.

Last year, the University of Essex opened a new facility where plants face an onslaught of harsh conditions. Within it is a lab called ‘the drought room’.

“What you can do is really hold them at the edge,” explains Dr Amanda Cavanagh from the university, “So they’re only getting as much water as they’re evaporating or transpiring. You keep them gasping and see what happens. From a plant perspective, we’re a bit sadistic.”

In another lab, the exact amount of rainfall, temperature and sunlight observed at an on-farm weather station – say a field in Lincolnshire – is recreated indoors, with a one-day delay, allowing close to real-world tests.

The work is focused on the processes that take place in plants during photosynthesis, and making them more efficient. Among them photorespiration, which happens normally, but more so at higher temperatures and is “a large energy cost for the plant”.

A study published late last year by researchers at the University of Essex and University of Illinois showed that by adding two new genes to a potato they could improve its photosynthetic efficiency. In farm field testing, during a heatwave, the modified potatoes grew 30% more tubers – prompting scientists to herald a “heatwave-surviving spud”.

“One of the really exciting things for us was that we couldn’t find a trade-off in quality. So we could maintain yield or improve yield under heat stress, but without taking a hit on the micronutrients the potatoes actually give us,” Cavanagh explains.

“Our major food crops are under threat from climate change, and our work has now confirmed that strategies to increase thermotolerance will translate from model to food crops,” she adds.

Crisis as the new normal

For a long time in agriculture, and certainly since the middle of last century, growers have pursued high and stable yield in their breeding, at the cost of resilience. Fine in a “more predictable” climate, but that’s fading fast. The need for hardier varieties of crops is urgent.

“Plants, unlike animals, cannot seek refuge from heat. The only solution is to make them better able to tolerate what is to come,” says Professor Prem Bhalla from the University of Melbourne. “The traditional breeding approach is painstaking and has a long frame. To give our crops the best chance, we will have to use genetic modification techniques. While these have often been controversial, they are our best shot in responding to the threat.”

But even genetically modified or edited, heat resilient crops are “10 to 15 years away optimistically from being commercially available, if everything works at every stage from now until then”, Cavanagh says.

“To your average British consumer, it seems like it’s a problem maybe for the next generation, but actually if we don’t have these tools in our toolbox now, we really won’t have them in 15 years when we really need them.”

The UK’s climate change-induced crop challenges, of course, happen in a global context.

“Who doesn’t delight in getting Suffolk apricots in their veg box, olive oil from Essex or seeing lemons growing outside?” Meldrum says. “But the question that always haunts me is: if we can grow oranges here, what are the people who were growing oranges growing now?”

As the UK warms up, so will the rest of the world, in many places with far more severity.

A 2022 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast that 10% of current global crop and livestock area will become “climatically unsuitable” by 2050, and more than 30% by 2100 under a high emissions scenario. Other studies have suggested extreme weather in one location could have a knock-on effect on other regions, pushing up the risk of “multiple breadbasket failure”, while global warming increases the voracity of pests and disease.

Over the past 50 years, productivity growth in the three major staple crops – maize, wheat and rice – has slowed, and in some cases reversed. Globally, climate change has reduced agricultural productivity by 21% since the 1960s, “a slowdown that is equivalent to losing the last seven years of productivity growth” 2021 Cornell University research found.

At the same time, global demand is rising. A 2021 meta-analysis of 57 projections found global food demand is expected to increase by up to 56% by 2050.

“As climate and other impacts on the food system accelerate, there is a high likelihood of supply shocks and a global food crisis, or at the very least a rolling series of regional ones that build into crisis as the new normal,” says Gilding. “This will create geopolitical upheaval, conflict and disorder – with major global economic impacts.”

The UK imports around 45% of its vegetables and 83% of its fruit, according to government figures. Those exporting countries could well become more protectionist.

With climate change comes mass movement of people too – which could spark further anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK and a rise of populism. That’s a problem when UK growers rely so heavily on foreign labour, particularly during harvesting. “It could get pretty ugly,” Gilding says.

Naturally, there will be an impact on prices too.

“Until we get to net zero emissions extreme weather will only get worse, but it’s already damaging crops and pushing up the price of food all over the world,” says Maximillian Kotz, lead author of a report published last month by six European research organisations and the European Central Bank, demonstrating the link between climate events and price hikes.

A July report by the Autonomy Institute estimated that by 2050 in a high-emission scenario, food prices could rise by 34% in the UK due to heatwaves and droughts internationally and at home.

“Plants, unlike animals, cannot seek refuge from the heat”

Professor Prem Bhalla, University of Melbourne

This “climateflation”, they say, could add £1,247 a year to British household annual food bills.

And prices could be pushed up still further as the cost of moving food around the UK rises.

“A warming UK climate and in particular, hotter summers, will place greater demands on the infrastructure required to keep products cold,” the Cold Chain Federation says. “In some cases, this is already pushing equipment beyond their designed maximum operating temperatures, risking a greater chance of breaks in the cold chain in the future.”

The pressure will demand more reliance on emerging approaches to food production – like vertical farming, precision fermentation, and cellular agriculture, Gilding argues.

“They will be producing the same food but doing so more efficiently and cleanly,” he says. “The market acceleration of these approaches will not be driven by a moral or social imperative, nor by consumer choice. It will be driven by national food security imperatives and by the economics of manufacturing and technology creating food ingredients that are simply more competitive – cheaper, healthier and safer.”

There is a choice, Gilding says: “Will we drive the adoption of these new approaches fast enough to outpace a changing climate… or will we be too slow and take the alternate path of building food crises, disorder and economic decline?”

Solutions to survive

The mood and focus in the scientific community has changed – from hoping to halt climate change, to figuring out how we might survive it. Solutions to feeding the UK when things warm up further show promise, but they’ll take time to develop and adopt.

“We can adapt, but it takes time to adapt, and industry needs to recognise that. They take comfort in a belief that transformational change is difficult and complex and will be very slow,” says Gilding. “They put forward barriers like the challenge of shifting farmer behaviour, the resistance of consumers to change, the political power of the farm lobby, the cultural context around food and the widespread affection for traditional farming.”

Industry also “sees sustainability as an optional ‘something we should do’, rather than a set of physical limits that will undermine the economics and stability of the current system, making change inevitable”, he adds.

As Meldrum puts it: “Bluntly, we’re in the midst of the tipping point – but because it’s not an overnight change it is somehow difficult for policy makers and all of us to properly comprehend.”

But we must.

“If you think we’re going to stop climate change before it impacts us, well it’s too late for that,” says Gilding. “Can we stop climate change before it decimates us? Yes, we can.”