Abstract: FACCE MACSUR comprises many different groups whose work contribute to improving the European capacity of modelling agriculture with climate change and providing an assess­ment of these impacts for stakeholders. Some groups work on methodological issues in a single discipline, others work on cross-disciplinary concepts. The meeting provided an opportunity for the members of the groups to meet for intensive discussions and exchange of ideas, which is not as easily done in phone or video conferences. Various groups also met with each other to agree on work plans and common settings for research. Overall, 105 researchers attended the workshops. For coordinating work with the global program AgMIP, AgMIP’s principle investigator John Antle attended the meeting and, meeting in a video call, coordination teams of MACSUR and AgMIP agreed to continue the successful collaboration in the future. Major overarching outcomes of the meetings were agreements on policy and climate scenarios recommended to be used within MACSUR, development of an approach to quantify effects of extreme climatic events on socio-economic indicators, and closer collaboration among several groups at the level of regional case studies.

Abstract: We present protocols and input data for Phase 1 of the Global Gridded Crop Model Intercomparison, a project of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP). The project includes global simulations of yields, phenologies, and many land-surface fluxes using 12-15 modeling groups for many crops, climate forcing data sets, and scenarios over the historical period from 1948 to 2012. The primary outcomes of the project include (1) a detailed comparison of the major differences and similarities among global models commonly used for large-scale climate impact assessment, (2) an evaluation of model and ensemble hindcasting skill, (3) quantification of key uncertainties from climate input data, model choice, and other sources, and (4) a multi-model analysis of the agricultural impacts of large-scale climate extremes from the historical record.

Abstract: Livestock farming is the world’s largest land use sector and utilizes around 60% of the global biomass harvest. Over the coming decades, climate change will affect the natural resource base of livestock production, especially the productivity of rangeland and feed crops. Based on a comprehensive impact modeling chain, we assess implications of different climate projections for agricultural production costs and land use change and explore the effectiveness of livestock system transitions as an adaptation strategy. Simulated climate impacts on crop yields and rangeland productivity generate adaptation costs amounting to 3% of total agricultural production costs in 2045 (i.e. 145 billion US$). Shifts in livestock production towards mixed crop-livestock systems represent a resource-and cost-efficient adaptation option, reducing agricultural adaptation costs to 0.3% of total production costs and simultaneously abating deforestation by about 76 million ha globally. The relatively positive climate impacts on grass yields compared with crop yields favor grazing systems inter alia in South Asia and North America. Incomplete transitions in production systems already have a strong adaptive and cost reducing effect: a 50% shift to mixed systems lowers agricultural adaptation costs to 0.8%. General responses of production costs to system transitions are robust across different global climate and crop models as well as regarding assumptions on CO2 fertilization, but simulated values show a large variation. In the face of these uncertainties, public policy support for transforming livestock production systems provides an important lever to improve agricultural resource management and lower adaptation costs, possibly even contributing to emission reduction.