The Interplay between Agricultural Subsidies and Climate Change: A Systematic Review of Emerging Themes and Research Directions

Agricultural subsidies have been a key financial mechanism in ensuring agricultural productivity and food security. They have recently attracted growing interest in their potential to deliver long-term sustainable food systems and climate action. This article consolidates state-of-the-art research on the roles of agricultural subsidies and their linkages to climate adaptation and mitigation, identifying research gaps beneficial in leveraging financial restructuring of agrifood systems for synergized climate action. Applying a systematic review using PRISMA, we analyzed 331 peer-reviewed articles (2000–2024) that discuss agricultural subsidies and finance with climate linkages in country-based studies from an initial 3434 Scopus-indexed articles. Through bibliometric evaluation and full-text analysis, this review reveals that prevalent approaches focus on the immediate impact of subsidies, signaling the discrepancy between limited studies on subsidies’ benefits and their long-term sustainability outcomes. Findings suggest that existing literature can benefit from comprehensive research on optimizing subsidies that are co-opting adaptation and mitigation, broadening examination to include developing countries and subregions, building more empirical studies rooted in practice, and understanding country-specific subsidy reform for climate synergies. This review provides insights for facilitating the restructuring of agricultural subsidy systems to deliver climate action. It offers future research a conceptual framework integrating subsidies, finance, and sustainability.