Sustainable agricultural production under climate change shocks: an analysis of impacts and adaptation strategies

Climate change is no longer an external shock to agricultural production. It has become a structural constraint, and this makes it central to any discussion of sustainable agricultural development. Drawing on recent empirical and review studies indexed in the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and Scopus, this review organizes the evidence along four lines. (1) The theoretical pathways through which climate factors affect agricultural production run through crop physiological stress, nonlinear meteorological-statistical relationships, and economic factor allocation. In each case, the response function is threshold-dependent and state-dependent. (2) Quantitative evidence on yield and welfare losses points in a consistent direction, but magnitudes remain highly dispersed across regions, crops, and scenarios. Accounting that uses calories as the sole metric systematically underestimates costs related to nutritional quality and household welfare. (3) Climate-adaptive agricultural practices are generally effective, yet their effects have clear failure zones and sign reversals. Engineered adaptation and mitigation also trade off against each other in observable ways. (4) Future strategies should replace single-policy approaches with instrument mixes. The estimated moderating association of agricultural insurance is state-dependent: it varies with shock type and intensity and with credit and policy conditions, rather than weakening monotonically as risk intensity rises. The efficiency gains of digital technologies have not yet been conclusively shown to translate into climate resilience, and green finance and policy coordination face development-threshold constraints. This reviewed evidence points to three consistent judgments. Conventional accounting underestimates the true costs of climate change. The effectiveness of adaptation measures is conditional. And the marginal effects of single policy instruments are state-dependent: they may weaken or strengthen with shock type and intensity, and in some high-risk contexts they fail outright. Research gaps center on three areas: regional imbalances in global evidence, weak causal identification of adaptation effects, and the lack of a unified analytical framework for adaptation-mitigation trade-offs.