Abstract: This paper addresses protein crop production in Europe. European food and feed industries highly depend on imported protein crops and derived products and climate change is likely to affect domestic protein crop production and thus the import dependency. The recent reform of EU agricultural policy reform aims at promoting climate friendly agricultural practices and stimulating the production of protein crops. We choose three contrasting climate change scenarios as well as specifications of the recent CAP reform in order to investigate how farmers might adapt to changing land use restrictions and climate conditions. Output response, land allocation and nitrogen use are the main variables of interest. Exemplified for Austrian cropland, we apply an integrated modeling framework consisting of a statistical climate change model, a crop rotation model, the bio-physical process model EPIC, and the economic bottom-up land use optimization model BiomAT. This model maximizes total gross margins by optimizing for land use and crop management practices for different scenarios of climate change and market conditions. Results obtained at a 1 km grid are aggregated to the national level. The model results indicate that changes in policy conditions, cropland use, and flexibility in crop management practices may have stronger effects on total protein crop production than climate change in the next decades. An expansion of current protein crop production leads to an increase in marginal opportunity costs, reduces mineral fertilizer input demand, and mainly replaces maize in the crop rotations. No Label

Abstract: Climate change will pose considerable challenges to Austrian agriculture which will likely be affected by a higher frequency of extreme weather events and more volatile commodity prices. We want to analyse the spatial, economic and social dimension of this threat by exploring expected consequences for the most important agricultural activity in Austria, cattle and dairy farming. We will evaluate a broad bouquet of adaptation measures from both, the perspective of the single farm as well as from the agricultural policy perspective. By aligning scenarios on projections of climate conditions and socio-economic developments with those developed in the EU MACSUR project (www.macsur.eu), the results will be consistent with state of the art analyses on climate change in Europe. By integrating results from a well established life cycle analysis model that will be specified to the Austrian situation we will broaden the spectrum of existing knowledge substantially. The results will allow policy makers to base their decisions on evidence that is not limited to the Austrian situations but includes spillover effects to foreign countries as well. Farmers willbe able to benefit directly from results of this project because stakeholders from the farm sector are part of the analyses from the beginning. An additional benefit of the project is that it is closely integrated to the activities of the international network of researchers working on climate change and food security in Europe.

Abstract: Climate change will increase the number and severity of heat waves, and is expected to negatively affect crop yields. Here we show for wheat and maize across Europe that heat stress is considerably reduced by irrigation due to surface cooling for both current and projected future climate. We demonstrate that crop heat stress impact assessments should be based on canopy temperature because simulations with air temperatures measured at standard weather stations cannot reproduce differences in crop heat stress between irrigated and rainfed conditions. Crop heat stress was overestimated on irrigated land when air temperature was used with errors becoming larger with projected climate change. Corresponding errors in mean crop yield calculated across Europe for baseline climate 1984-2013 of 0.2 Mg yr(-1) (2%) and 0.6 Mg yr(-1) (5%) for irrigated winter wheat and irrigated grain maize, respectively, would increase to up to 1.5 Mg yr (1) (16%) for irrigated winter wheat and 4.1 Mg yr (1) (39%) for irrigated grain maize, depending on the climate change projection/GCM combination considered. We conclude that climate change impact assessments for crop heat stress need to account explicitly for the impact of irrigation.