Beyond the black swan: climate change and the evolving risk of multi-mycotoxin contamination

Major mycotoxin contamination events have traditionally been treated as "black swans," rare, high-impact episodes that are unpredictable in advance and explained only after they occur. This framing assumes long intervals between events and a single dominant toxin per episode, an assumption that reflects, in part, historical single-analyte monitoring rather than proof that other toxins were biologically absent. Climate change is a plausible driver of change in both assumptions. As interacting climate factors, temperature, water availability and atmospheric CO₂, become more frequent and more extreme, episodes that used to be spaced by decades could increasingly occur several times within the same cropping season. This would not only be a change in frequency. The same interacting factors have been shown, in experimental systems, to modify, and in many cases widen, the range of conditions under which mycotoxigenic fungi grow and, at the same time, the range of conditions under which they produce toxin, so that windows that used to be separate can overlap for several species at once. The consequence, consistent with survey data across several crops, food products and continents, though improved multi-analyte detection likely also contributes to it, may not be simply more of one toxin but the regular co-occurrence of multiple mycotoxins in the same raw material. Current risk models, surveillance programs and legislation remain largely built around single-toxin, single-species assumptions calibrated on historical, regional data. This Perspective proposes an ecological framework linking climate change to an increased risk of multi-mycotoxin contamination, offered as a plausible hypothesis rather than an established transition, and outlines what this implies for monitoring, modeling and regulation.