Climate Risks for the European Food System and Policy Preparedness
EU food policy addresses climate risk in fragments — a new review maps every link in the chain and finds the gaps are biggest mid-chain.
Europe is often framed as one of the regions best positioned to weather climate change — wealthier, better governed, and less agriculturally exposed than much of the Global South. Müller et al. (2026) complicate that picture substantially.
Drawing on the European Climate Risk Assessment (EUCRA) and a broad sweep of recent literature, the paper traces climate risk through the entire European food system — from field to fork — and finds that while adaptation options exist at every link in the chain, EU policy remains fragmented, insufficiently ambitious, and largely blind to the mid-chain vulnerabilities in processing, logistics, and retail that sit between farm and household.
Key Findings
Crop production faces compounding and converging stresses
European crop productivity is globally among the least negatively affected by climate change in aggregate, but that continental average masks a stark north-south divide. Southern and central European regions face severe climate-driven yield declines, while northern latitudes may gain. More concerning than the directional trends is the compounding dynamics: summer droughts comparable to the exceptional 2018 event — which saw over two-thirds of EU territory under severe drought conditions and caused yield losses of up to 55% in some wheat regions — are projected to become the norm in central and northern Europe by the 2050s. Simultaneously, the historical "see-saw" mechanism — where favorable conditions in northern regions compensated for southern losses — is projected to break down under continued warming, making pan-European yield compensation increasingly unlikely.
Livestock, fisheries, and aquaculture carry underappreciated but compounding vulnerabilities
Heat stress, altered fodder quality, water shortages, and shifting disease dynamics threaten livestock production, with poultry and swine in open-housing southern systems facing the greatest direct exposure. Fisheries face highly complex interactions across warming, acidification, eutrophication, and shifting species distributions, with the Baltic Sea among the fastest-warming marine environments globally. Aquaculture, while relatively modest in European output, faces frequent extreme-event disruptions and is heavily dependent on imported feed whose supply chains run through climate-vulnerable regions. The paper flags that these sectors receive far less research attention than crop production, creating blind spots that translate directly into policy gaps.
Global trade dependencies amplify and transmit climate shocks into Europe
The EU is a net importer of key commodities including seafood, fruits and nuts, oilseeds, protein crops for animal feed, and fertilizers. Nearly half of EU agricultural imports are projected to be highly susceptible to global droughts by 2050. International climate impacts — including the increasing risk of simultaneous breadbasket failures across major global producer countries — can drive price volatility that cascades through European supply chains and onto household food bills, particularly for lower-income consumers. This trade exposure represents a significant and systematically underassessed pathway by which climate risks outside Europe become food security risks within it.
Mid-chain vulnerabilities remain largely absent from EU policy
The paper's most pointed structural finding is that EU policy coverage of climate risk is heavily concentrated at the production end of the food system. Food processing, cold-chain logistics, transport infrastructure, and retail — where climate change can disrupt storage integrity, accelerate spoilage, raise energy costs, and compromise cold-chain functionality through extreme weather events — have no dedicated EU climate resilience frameworks. An increase from 17°C to 25°C ambient storage temperature alone raises cold storage energy consumption by approximately 11%, directly compressing producer margins and raising consumer prices. The forthcoming European Climate Resilience and Risk Management Initiative may begin to address this, but as of the paper's analysis, these mid-chain risks remain largely ungoverned.
A Policy Architecture That Doesn't Yet Match the Risk
The paper's central argument is that existing EU instruments — the Common Agricultural Policy, the Farm-to-Fork strategy (now de facto replaced by the 2025 Vision for Agriculture and Food), the Common Fisheries Policy, the EU Climate Law, and the Adaptation Strategy — address food system climate risk from complementary but disconnected angles. They do not form a coherent hierarchy, they leave implementation heavily dependent on Member State commitment, and the recent Vision for Agriculture and Food has been criticised for prioritising near-term regulatory simplification and rural economic competitiveness over the long-term systemic resilience that Farm-to-Fork was beginning to build.
The 6.8% of the European population currently moderately-to-severely food insecure, and the 11.9 million additional people estimated to have experienced food insecurity due to climate change since 1981–2010, underscore that this is not a future problem. Getting the policy architecture right — integrated, systemic, and genuinely forward-looking — is already overdue.
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