Abstract: Moving towards a more sustainable future requires concerted actions, particularly in the context of global climate change. Integrated assessments of agricultural systems (IAAS) are considered valuable tools to provide sound information for policy and decision-making. IAAS use storylines to define socio-economic and environmental framework assumptions. While a set of qualitative global storylines, known as the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs), is available to inform integrated assessments at large scales, their spatial resolution and scope is insufficient for regional studies in agriculture. We present a protocol to operationalize the development of Shared Socio-economic Pathways for European agriculture – Eur-Agri-SSPs- to support IAAS. The proposed design of the storyline development process is based on six quality criteria: plausibility, vertical and horizontal consistency, salience, legitimacy, richness and creativity. Trade-offs between these criteria may occur. The process is science-driven and iterative to enhance plausibility and horizontal consistency. A nested approach is suggested to link storylines across scales while maintaining vertical consistency. Plausibility, legitimacy, salience, richness and creativity shall be stimulated in a participatory and interdisciplinary storyline development process. The quality criteria and process design requirements are combined in the protocol to increase conceptual and methodological transparency. The protocol specifies nine working steps. For each step, suitable methods are proposed and the intended level and format of stakeholder engagement are discussed. A key methodological challenge is to link global SSPs with regional perspectives provided by the stakeholders, while maintaining vertical consistency and stakeholder buy-in. We conclude that the protocol facilitates systematic development and evaluation of storylines, which can be transferred to other regions, sectors and scales and supports intercomparisons of IAAS.

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