Attributing the 2022 European maize failure on anthropogenic climate change

In 2022, Europe experienced an exceptional and wide-spread compound heat-drought event, causing one of the most severe maize crop failures in recent decades. Understanding the influence of anthropogenic climate change on such high-impact events is essential for climate adaptation planning and agricultural risk management. Here, by combining observations, process-based crop model simulations from the ORCHIDEE-crop and climate model outputs, we show that maize yields across the European Union collapsed to 22% below trend expectations, with spatially compounding losses across multiple regions, particularly in eastern Europe. The 2022 crop failure was mainly driven by high temperatures during the reproductive phase. Anthropogenic climate change has already reshaped the climatic baseline for maize growth in Europe, with strongly increasing growing-season temperatures accompanied by weakly declining precipitation. These long-term changes have heightened the likelihood of concurrent heat and drought stress and increased the risk of crop failure events. Our factual and counterfactual simulations reveal that anthropogenic climate change has decreased EU maize yield by 25%  (~17Mt production) in 2022, with reductions in top six producing-countries ranging from 15% to 40%. These results highlight that human-induced warming is now a key driver of European agricultural production risks, substantially amplifying the threats of compound heat-drought extremes to regional food security.