How Climate Change Could Threaten Food Safety: What You Need to Know

The planet is warming, and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and severe. Across the globe, changes in climate are placing enormous pressures on entire ecosystems. Years-long droughts, severe rains and flooding, and frequent wildfires are among the increasingly disruptive weather events that are having cascading effects on perhaps the most essential ecosystem for humans—the food ecosystem.

While cyclical weather events such as El Niño and La Niña play a vital role in shifting weather patterns and events, it’s the long-term trend in climate changes wrought by human activity that most experts believe, and science supports, exacerbate these cyclical patterns to a degree by which the health of ecosystems cannot be maintained or, if unimpeded, reversed. From depleting the soil of nutrients to interfering with the proper storage of foods for human consumption, climate change holds the potential to disrupt all aspects of the food chain. Ensuring food safety in this climate is an ever-growing concern.

For food producers and processors already tasked with the continuous, difficult mandate to ensure the safety of their food products, the task may feel Sisyphean amid new and uncertain challenges all along the food chain caused by the warming planet. “Predicting the most significant impacts of climate change on food safety is challenging given the dynamic nature of climate change,” says Sara Bratager, senior food safety and traceability scientist at the Institute of Food Technologies (IFT). Rather than one dominant impact of climate change on food safety, she thinks it more likely that there will be a collection of emerging risks whose impacts will vary regionally.

For Bratager, the problem presented by climate change to food safety is one that carries opportunity. “Climate change is encouraging us to think differently and more comprehensively about food safety practices,” she says.

Brenda Zai, a PhD candidate in the department of population medicine at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, put a stronger note on a similar message. “It is not necessarily the impacts of climate change on food safety risks that are the major concern; it is how solutions and resources are developed,” she said.

She’d like to see more of a focus on mitigating and adapting to climate change rather than the current focus on preventing it. “Ultimately, climate change impacts are inevitable; therefore, a shift in mindset is central to adapting to these impacts to lessen their burden,” she says. Without this shift, she thinks “the agri-food industry and public health will continue to be vulnerable to climate-sensitive food safety risks.”

Focusing on climate change as a catalyst for improving food safety solutions, there remain several big questions. What are the effects of climate change on food safety that can spur more comprehensive food safety practices? How can food producers and processors position themselves to best handle these effects and strengthen their food safety protocols?

Risks to Food Safety

Rising temperatures across the globe, with 2023 as the hottest year on record according to a 2024 report from the World Meteorological Organization, are exacerbating a range of food safety concerns. Water and crop contamination are major concerns, as detailed in a 2020 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, “Climate Change: Unpacking the Burden on Food Safety.” From worsening algae blooms along coastlines and lakes that harm marine plants and animals, to higher incidences of foodborne pathogens caused by heavy precipitation events and flooding, to increases in and expanded geographical areas with mycotoxin contamination in staple crops, the incremental but impactful heating up of the earth’s water and land is presenting new challenges to keeping food safe all along the food chain.