According to a study, global warming increases the amount of soil-borne pathogens worldwide. Fungal plant pathogens are contaminating plant feed and food, thus posing a long-term threat to food safety and food security. The publication presents a global atlas of plant pathogen occurrence based on data from a nine-year global field experiment and uses modelling to predict where future spread is likely to occur, and which regions will be at increased risk of pathogen exposure under different environmental conditions.

A study published in 2021 stated that the expected changes in climatic conditions (e.g. temperature, rainfall patterns) will exacerbate the disease dry root rot caused by the necrotrophic phytopathogenic fungus Rhizoctonia bataticola to epidemic proportions and will threaten the chickpea production in India.

An article, also from 2021, provides an overview of emerging fungal diseases caused by climate change. According to the authors completely new fungal species hypothesised to have emerged due to climate change, e.g. Candida auris (first identified in 2009). Fungal species like Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis and Cryptococcus deuterogattii were able to cause significant outbreaks that appear related to climate change. New virulent fungal lineages of Puccinia striiformis (rust fungus) and Fusarium head blight with adaptations might have evolved in response to climate change. They also highlighted the close link between natural disasters (floods, droughts, cyclones) caused by climate change and fungal infections.