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Long-range climate impacts on crop yield and the implications of enacting global carbon mitigation policies
Citation:
Long-range climate impacts on crop yield and the implications of enacting global carbon mitigation policies. CLIMATIC CHANGE. Springer Netherlands, , Netherlands.
Impact/Purpose:
Estimate the impacts of climate change on agricultural crop yields.
Description:
Research on climate impacts and agriculture over the past two decades has applied simulation models at a range of scales and future climate scenarios, finding that crop growth and yield responds to changing climate conditions, and that the impacts are regional and highly dependent on future temperature, precipitation, CO2 and local adaptation efforts. Here we explore the specific influence of a climate mitigation scenario contrasted with a no climate policy (reference) scenario simulated in a coupled integrated assessment and climate model framework, to explore to what degree the climate outcome of an implemented policy could influence agricultural outcomes in the United States over the next century. We anticipate that the climate consequences of both the reference and the mitigation policy will result in crop yield changes over time, but that the magnitude, location and direction of these changes will be influenced by the climate policy outcome. We apply the climate projections out to year 2115 in the EPIC (Environmental Policy Integrated Climate) model for approximately 90,000 location and crop combinations across all agricultural lands of the continental United States. The influence of the climate mitigation scenario, contrasted to the reference scenario, does moderate the crop yield change over time and the scenarios diverge significantly in the post-2050 time period. In addition, simulations with different assumptions regarding the influence of the CO2 fertilization effect on crops significantly influence the yield trajectory and the relative relationship between the reference and mitigation scenarios, while applying climate simulations with different representations of natural variability did not significantly influence the overall crop yield outcome.