Food insecurity enhances political instability and migration ( 8), which aggravate national and regional food security concerns. Price volatility in the globally integrated food market threatens the stability of access to food by the poor, who spend a great proportion of their income on staple foods ( 7) also in Europe. While food availability is endangered in the long term ( 4, 5), yield variability induces price volatility and speculation ( 7). Reductions in wheat yield in global and temperate areas ( 4, 5) and an increase in yield variability are projected even with moderate warming ( 6). Climate change increases the uncertainty regarding local weather ( 1) and intensifies weather variability and extremes ( 2, 3). Increased awareness could foster governance of resilience through research and breeding programs, incentives, and regulation.įood security relies on the resilience of staple food crops to climatic variability. Assessments and communication of response diversity enable collective learning across supply chains. Consequently, the demand for climate resilience of staple food crops such as wheat must be better articulated. This assessment suggests that current breeding programs and cultivar selection practices do not sufficiently prepare for climatic uncertainty and variability.

Positive responses to abundant precipitation were lacking. A response diversity hotspot appeared in the trials in Slovakia, while response diversity “deserts” were identified in Czechia and Germany and for durum wheat in southern Europe. Similar responses to weather were identified in cultivar trials among central European countries and southern European countries. Here, we show a decline in the response diversity of wheat in farmers’ fields in most European countries after 2002–2009 based on 101,000 cultivar yield observations. The capacity of a sole crop genotype to perform well under climatic variability is limited therefore, a set of cultivars with diverse responses to weather conditions critical to crop yield is required. A diversity of responses to disturbance is considered a key determinant of resilience. Food security relies on the resilience of staple food crops to climatic variability and extremes, but the climate resilience of European wheat is unknown.

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