Strauss, F., Moltchanova, E., & Schmid, E. (2013). Spatially explicit modeling of long-term drought impacts on crop production in Austria. American Journal of Climate Change, 2(3), 1–11.
Abstract: Droughts have serious and widespread impacts on crop production with substantial economic losses. The frequency and severity of drought events may increase in the future due to climate change. We have developed three meteorological drought scenarios for Austria in the period 2008-2040. The scenarios are defined based on a dry day index which is combined with bootstrapping from an observed daily weather dataset of the period 1975-2007. The severity of long-term drought scenarios is characterized by lower annual and seasonal precipitation amounts as well as more sig- nificant temperature increases compared to the observations. The long-term impacts of the drought scenarios on Aus- trian crop production have been analyzed with the biophysical process model EPIC (Environmental Policy Integrated Climate). Our simulation outputs show that—for areas with historical mean annual precipitation sums below 850 mm— already slight increases in dryness result in significantly lower crop yields i.e. depending on the drought severity, be- tween 0.6% and 0.9% decreases in mean annual dry matter crop yields per 1.0% decrease in mean annual precipitation sums. The EPIC results of more severe droughts show that spring and summer precipitation may become a limiting factor in crop production even in regions with historical abundant precipitation.
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Kyle, P., Müller, C., Calvin, K., & Thomson, A. (2014). Meeting the radiative forcing targets of the representative concentration pathways in a world with agricultural climate impacts. Earth’s Future, 2, 83–98.
Abstract: This study assesses how climate impacts on agriculture may change the evolution of the agricultural and energy systems in meeting the end-of-century radiative forcing targets of the representative concentration pathways (RCPs). We build on the recently completed Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISI-MIP) exercise that has produced global gridded estimates of future crop yields for major agricultural crops using climate model projections of the RCPs from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). For this study we use the bias-corrected outputs of the HadGEM2-ES climate model as inputs to the LPJmL crop growth model, and the outputs of LPJmL to modify inputs to the GCAM integrated assessment model. Our results indicate that agricultural climate impacts generally lead to an increase in global cropland, as compared with corresponding emissions scenarios that do not consider climate impacts on agricultural productivity. This is driven mostly by negative impacts on wheat, rice, other grains, and oil crops. Still, including agricultural climate impacts does not significantly increase the costs or change the technological strategies of global, whole-system emissions mitigation. In fact, to meet the most aggressive climate change mitigation target (2.6W/m(2) in 2100), the net mitigation costs are slightly lower when agricultural climate impacts are considered. Key contributing factors to these results are (a) low levels of climate change in the low-forcing scenarios, (b) adaptation to climate impacts simulated in GCAM through inter-regional shifting in the production of agricultural goods, and (c) positive average climate impacts on bioenergy crop yields.
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Trnka, M., Feng, S., Semenov, M. A., Olesen, J. E., Kersebaum, K. C., Roetter, R. P., et al. (2019). Mitigation efforts will not fully alleviate the increase in water scarcity occurrence probability in wheat-producing areas. Sci. Adv., 5(9), eaau2406.
Abstract: Global warming is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of severe water scarcity (SWS) events, which negatively affect rain-fed crops such as wheat, a key source of calories and protein for humans. Here, we develop a method to simultaneously quantify SWS over the world’s entire wheat-growing area and calculate the probabilities of multiple/sequential SWS events for baseline and future climates. Our projections show that, without climate change mitigation (representative concentration pathway 8.5), up to 60% of the current wheat-growing area will face simultaneous SWS events by the end of this century, compared to 15% today. Climate change stabilization in line with the Paris Agreement would substantially reduce the negative effects, but they would still double between 2041 and 2070 compared to current conditions. Future assessments of production shocks in food security should explicitly include the risk of severe, prolonged, and near- simultaneous droughts across key world wheat-producing areas.
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