Climate change is projected to exacerbate food insecurity in sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA) by reducing crop yields and soil fertility. Many climate change impact studies in SSA have overlooked long‐term effects of soil fertility on crop yield. We evaluated maize yields under different scenarios of soil fertility (using soil organic carbon as a proxy) and climate change (considering changes in temperature, rainfall, and CO 2 ) at fo...

Southern Africa is a hotspot of climate change where smallholder farmers are particularly threatened because they largely depend on rainfed agriculture for their livelihoods. The objective of the study was to assess the potential of two main principles (no-tillage and crop residue retention) of conservation agriculture (CA) and nitrogen (N) fertilizer management to mitigate the negative effects of future climate (2021–2060) on...

Shang et al. (2024) recently suggested to include nitrous oxide (N 2 O) emissions during the fallow period to better estimate N 2 O emission factors (EFs). We however highlighted several pitfalls of the proposed adjusted EFs for croplands in the specific case of dry subhumid, semiarid, and arid regions with dry fallow periods, these regions covering about 47% of the Earth's terrestrial area.

Major drivers of gains or losses in soil organic carbon (SOC) include land management, land‐use change, and climate change. Thousands of original studies have focused on these drivers of SOC change and are now compiled in a growing number of meta‐analyses. To critically assess the research efforts in this domain, we retrieved and characterized 192 meta‐analyses of SOC stocks or concentrations. These meta‐analyses comprise more...

Smallholder farmers in sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA) currently grow rainfed maize with limited inputs including fertilizer. Climate change may exacerbate current production constraints. Crop models can help quantify the potential impact of climate change on maize yields, but a comprehensive multimodel assessment of simulation accuracy and uncertainty in these low‐input systems is currently lacking. We evaluated the impact of varyin...

Potential consequences of climate change on crop production can be studied using mechanistic crop simulation models. While a broad variety of maize simulation models exist, it is not known whether different models diverge on grain yield responses to changes in climatic factors, or whether they agree in their general trends related to phenology, growth, and yield. With the goal of analyzing the sensitivity of simulated yields t...