PubMed · 2026-01-01
A fungal disease called tef head smudge is threatening tef, a critical grain crop for food security in Ethiopia. Climate change will dramatically shift where both the crop and disease can survive, with some scenarios showing the disease spreading into far more tef-growing areas by 2050.
Under current climate, tef head smudge disease and tef crops overlap on 9,659 hectares; this overlap could nearly double to 15,846 hectares by 2050 under a high-emissions scenario (SSP585).
Tef crop coverage in the Western Amhara Region is projected to shift significantly — shrinking to 19.97% of the region by 2070 under the extreme climate scenario (SSP285), down from 33% today.
MaxEnt climate models predicted tef distribution with 89–90.5% accuracy and tef head smudge disease with over 93% accuracy, lending strong confidence to the projections.