Impacts of aerosol meteorological feedback on China's yield potential of soybean

China's severe particle pollution could affect the regional climate and weather conditions that consequently threaten local to global food security. Yet, the underlying mechanisms and quantitative assessment of aerosols on crop yields remain unknown. Here, by integrating a meteorology–chemistry model and a crop model, we show the impacts of atmospheric aerosols on China's meteorology and soybean yields. We find that the potential yields of soybean would decrease in most parts of China due to direct aerosol radiation effects, while showing diverse responses in parts of the Northeast and North China Plain. Moreover, because of the high sensitivity of soybean growth to water, potential yield fluctuations are closely related to aerosol-induced precipitation changes in most soybean-growing regions of China. In particular, aerosols play the most important role during soybean's pod-filling stage, in which the influence of both precipitation perturbations and negative solar radiative forcing is about 5–10 times that of air temperature on crop yield. Our study thereby identifies aerosol mitigation can bring a notable increase in crop yields, highlighting the potential for important co-benefits in food security across polluting developing countries.