# Climate change may outpace current wheat breeding yield improvements in North America

## TL;DR

Wheat breeding improvements may not keep up with climate change, as rising temperatures reduce yields of new wheat varieties in North America.

## Contribution

The study shows that new wheat breeding lines are not sufficiently resilient to future climate conditions, risking yield declines.

## Key findings

- Advanced winter wheat breeding lines show a 3.6% yield decline per 1 °C warming, better than older varieties.
- Spring wheat breeding lines are more sensitive to warming, with a 7.5% yield reduction per 1 °C.
- Future climate scenarios suggest warming may outpace yield gains from current breeding efforts.

## Abstract

Variety adaptation to future climate for wheat is important but lacks comprehensive understanding. Here, we evaluate genetic advancement under current and future climate using a dataset of wheat breeding nurseries in North America during 1960-2018. Results show that yields declined by 3.6% per 1 °C warming for advanced winter wheat breeding lines, compared with −5.5% for the check variety, indicating a superior climate-resilience. However, advanced spring wheat breeding lines showed a 7.5% yield reduction per 1 °C warming, which is more sensitive than a 7.1% reduction for the check variety, indicating climate resilience is not improved and may even decline for spring wheat. Under future climate of SSP scenarios, yields of winter and spring wheat exhibit declining trends even with advanced breeding lines, suggesting future climate warming could outpace the yield gains from current breeding progress. Our study highlights that the adaptation progress following the current wheat breeding strategies is challenging.

Wheat breeding programmes improve yield by enhancing biotic and abiotic stress resistance. This study reveals that high temperature extremes adversely affect the productivity of new elite wheat breeding lines, and that future yield gains may be outpaced by the rapid advance of climate change.