In the next 50-odd years, Britons could be enjoying diets rich in locally-grown sorghum, okra, chickpeas, and oranges. According to the results of an unprecedented new mapping study, researchers have found that a host of warm-weather crops like these could find new roots in British soils, if temperatures rise to between 2 °C and 4 °C above pre-industrial levels.
The researchers hope that this approach—called ‘horizon scanning’, which maps the suitability of crops under future climate change—can help governments and farmers to adapt to warmer weather by starting to select more resilient crops: “Without such data, agricultural systems are likely to be ‘locked in’ to current crops, with adaptations failing to keep pace with climate change,” researcher and co-author Rachel Warren explained in a press release.
The new study doesn’t just highlight new crops that farmers can introduce, but existing UK crops that will continue to thrive in climbing temperatures. It also reveals that the current heartlands of British agriculture will be displaced.
The findings are the result of a new more granular horizon modelling approach: to build it, the researchers started with 167 crops, including all the crops already grown in the UK, as well as several dozen others that are commonly farmed in warmer regions. For each crop, the model incorporated data from the FAO’s EcoCrop database, which provides information about the climate thresholds of hundreds of crops worldwide.
Combined with UK meteorological data from 1980 and projected out to 2080, the researchers were then able to create a gridded map of the country, down to the resolution of one square kilometre. This map showed whether each of those crops would survive, and where, if exposed to two separate climate scenarios: one where the world has warmed to 2 °C, and another to 4 °C, above pre-industrial levels.
The most striking revelation from this map was just how many crops would cope with hotter conditions: most of the UK’s major current crops actually showed an increase in suitability to the climate conditions as temperatures rose up to the 2 °C mark. One standout example is the chickpea, which currently grows in a small, confined area of the UK, but which showed some of the greatest potential to spread across the country. In fact even when temperatures rose by 4 °C in the model, none of the UK’s current major crops showed declining suitability across the whole of the UK.
Furthermore, under these warmer conditions, the country would be able to welcome dozens of new crops onto its farms, including okra, oranges, and even pomegranates, that typically thrive in drier and warmer regions elsewhere. Importantly, some of the most successful under the 4 °C warming scenario would be crops like durum wheat, which could be a direct replacement for nutritional staples like traditional wheat. The researchers also found that legumes would be some of the most successful crops in a warmer UK, and could provide a reliable source of protein and fix nitrogen in the soil—an opportunity to introduce more climate resilience onto UK farms.
However, a warmer climate is by no means all good news. Firstly, the study reveals that despite most crops continuing to thrive under warmer temperatures, there would be some clear agricultural losers in a climate-changed UK. Among these are apples, onions, oats, strawberries and wheat—currently abundant crops that will struggle to grow across as much of the country under 4 °C. In fact strawberries would decline across three of the four major farming regions mapped out in the UK.
More importantly, according to the map model most of the observed crop increases would happen outside of the UK’s current agricultural heartlands, which are in the country’s southeast. For instance, durum wheat—a possible replacement for common wheat—shows more potential for growth outside the southeasterly region where common wheat is currently grown.
This misalignment matters, because the UK landscapes that are most suitable for farming under future climate change are currently not set up to farm, lacking the infrastructure, transport links, and in some cases even the right geography and field size, to grow crops at scale.
So while the picture that emerges from horizon scanning seems overwhelmingly positive at first, on closer inspection it’s a more nuanced one. On the one hand, the UK’s future ability to accommodate more crops is an opportunity to diversify the farming landscape, boost food security, and even usher in more biodiversity, depending on how farms are arranged. On the other hand, UK farming could require an overhaul to match it up with future crop and climate needs (which also raises questions for nature and biodiversity if it involves the expansion of farming to new lands.)
The researchers hope the new model can act as a guide—perhaps by highlighting new crops that farmers should start to consider introducing onto their lands; pointing researchers towards current candidates that could be bred for greater climate resilience; and cueing governments on regions that need investment to ready them for future farms.
“Major changes to agricultural systems and diets can take decades to implement,” said Warren, “and so our long-term projections provide important information well ahead of time for farmers, supermarkets, researchers, policymakers and the public on the opportunities, challenges and trade-offs involved in adapting to the impacts of climate change.”
Redhead et. al. “National Horizon Scanning for Future Crops Under a Changing UK Climate.” Climate Resilience and Sustainability. 2025.
Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine. AI-generated.
