Current food trade helps mitigate future climate change impacts in lower-income nations

Consumption-based perspective is especially important for import- dependent countries We selected a few highly import-dependent countries to illustrate how climate impacts on national calorie supply is manifested (Fig 3). While some import-dependent countries (e.g., Japan, Costa Rica, Sudan, and Syria) rely on a few importing partners, others depend on a wider range of suppliers (such as Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates). For instance, both Japan and Costa Rica rely on the USA for more than 50% of their calorie supply from the three crops, a nation whose production is expected to be adversely affected by climate change. Further, climate impacts in the supplying countries can be positive or negative. For instance, Japan and Costa Rica experience negative import impacts from the USA, whereas Qatar, Sudan, Oman, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates source a significant portion of their food supply from regions where climate change may increase production (such as France, Australia, Russia, Germany, and Ukraine) (Fig 3). Fig 3. Visualizing how climate impacts are manifested for major import-dependent countries. The two panels correspond to 1˚C and 2˚C future mean global warming conditions relative to the level of recent warming (top & bottom). Each bar corresponds to a particular import-dependent country as labelled on the y-axis (see S1 Table for country codes). Each bar is made up of multiple stacks of different lengths and colors. Each stack corresponds to a

particular country supplying calories to the importing country (labelled on the y-axis). The length of each stack (measured on the x-axis) within each bar corresponds to the proportion of total calories supplied by that supplying country to the importing country. The color of each stack represents the crop-aggregated (wheat, maize, and rice) climate change impact on domestic production of the supplying country under different warming scenarios. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0314722.g003 PLOS ONE Current food trade helps mitigate future climate change impacts in lower-income nations PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0314722 January 3, 2025 9 / 16