Context

Population expansion has become a trend. To meet the growing demand for crops, the area required for planting crops will also increase in the future. Current research generally assumes that land suitable for crops will generally shrink under global change, which, together with the increased crop demand, poses challenges to food security.

Objective

The objective of this study is to access the global maize planting distribution by improving the crop distribution model with a special focus on both environmental and socioeconomic factors under the global change scenarios of SSP245 and SSP385.

Methods

We constructed a crop distribution model that considers both environmental and socioeconomic factors. The environmental factors include topography, soil, and climate variables, while socioeconomic factors include supply-demand balancing, planting inertia, trade, irrigation ratio, and yield progress variables. Through those two aspects, we conducted a comprehensive prediction for the maize planting distribution.

Results and conclusion

Compared with the statistics, the modelling results of most countries differ slightly from the statistical data (within 20%), which shows that the model has good performance. Based on the projections of the model, the predicted planting area under the SSP245 and SSP385 scenarios in the near-term (2016–2035) increases by 39.86% and 48.70%, and in the mid-term (2046–2065) increases by 56.17% and 75.73%, respectively. In addition, the maize planting zone has decreased in size in the United States, Mexico, northern Brazil, South Africa, and southern Europe.

Significance

Our study provided a comprehensive crop distribution model and projected the global maize planting distribution, emphasizing the importance of socioeconomic factors in crop distribution modelling. Our research could benefit agricultural risk and regional field management.