ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Ecol. Evol.
Sec. Conservation and Restoration Ecology
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvancing Nature-Based Solutions to Address the Impacts of Climate Change within the Global SouthView all 8 articles
Promote or Inhibit: How Climate Policy Uncertainty May Shape Extreme Weather's Impact on Grain Production
Provisionally accepted
- School of Economics and Management, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, China
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While existing research recognizes that policy conditions can influence the link between climate change and agricultural output, a critical question has long been overlooked: even if policy direction is correct, if policies are volatile and unpredictable, they can themselves become a source of risk. How this policy uncertainty alters the relationship between climate change and agricultural production lacks in-depth exploration in academia. This study aims to fill this critical gap by specifically revealing how Climate Policy Uncertainty (CPU) moderates the effects of temperature and precipitation on grain yields. Using panel data from 286 prefecture-level cities in China from 2001 to 2020, we constructed an economic-climate interaction model for empirical testing. The results show a significant inverted U-shaped relationship between climate factors and grain yields. However, when CPU increases, this relationship curve becomes significantly steeper, meaning the negative impact of extreme climate on grain yields is amplified. In other words, policy instability may exacerbate the destructive force of climate change. Further regional analysis reveals that this "amplification effect" of CPU is more prominent in non-major grain-producing areas: in the north, it primarily intensifies the precipitation-yield relationship, while in the south, it amplifies the temperature-yield relationship. It is noteworthy that in non-climate adaptation pilot cities, CPU exhibits a more pronounced negative moderating effect. The core implication of this research is: in the face of climate change, the clarity, coherence, and predictability of policies are themselves a crucial form of adaptive capacity. Ensuring policy stability can effectively stabilize farmers' production expectations and incentivize long-term investments to combat climate risks. Further, the results also underscore the necessity of driving systemic transformation to convert external risks into endogenous drivers, then CPUs' responses can be internalized as assets against future extreme weather within a risk framework in the future. Ultimately, anchoring climate-policy regimes in stable, Nature-Based Solutions—especially by advancing them across the Global South—offers a scalable pathway to turn policy uncertainty into ecological and social resilience.
Keywords: climate adaptation, Climate Change, Climate policy uncertainty, Grain yields, Moderating effect
Received: 24 Nov 2025; Accepted: 23 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Zhang, Zhang, Shi and Luo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yixuan Luo
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