Abstract Recently, the International Panel for Climate Change released the 6th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) climate change scenarios with shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs). The SSP scenarios result in signifcant changes to climate variables in climate projections compared to their predecessor, the representative concentration pathways from the CMIP5. Therefore, it is necessary to examine whether the CMIP6 scenarios diferentially impact plant–disease ecosystems compared to the CMIP5 scenarios. In this study, we used the EPIRICE-LB model to simulate and compare projected rice blast disease epidemics in the Korean Peninsula using fve selected family global climate models (GCMs) of the CMIP5 and CMIP6 for two forcing scenarios. We found a similar decrease in rice blast epidemics in both CMIP scenarios; however, this decrease was greater in the CMIP6 scenarios. In addition, distinctive epidemic trends were found in North Korea, where the rice blast epidemics increase until the mid-2040s but decrease thereafter until 2100, with diferent spatial patterns of varying magnitudes. Controlling devastating rice blast diseases will remain important during the next decades in North Korea, where appropriate chemical controls are unavailable due to chronic economic and political issues. Overall, our analyses using the new CMIP6 scenarios reemphasized the importance of developing efective control measures against rice blast for specifc high-risk areas and the need for a universal impact and vulnerability assessment platform for plant–disease ecosystems that can be used with new climate change scenarios in the future.