Lehtonen, H. (2015). Evaluating adaptation and the production development of Finnish agriculture in climate and global change. Agricultural and Food Science, 24(3), 219–234.
Abstract: Agricultural product prices and policies influence the development of crop yields under climate change through farm level management decisions. On this basis, five main scenarios were specified for agricultural commodity prices and crop yields. An economic agricultural sector model was used in order to assess the impacts of the scenarios on production, land use and farm income in Finland. The results suggest that falling crop yields, if realized due to low prices and restrictive policies, will result in decreasing crop and livestock production and increasing nutrient surplus. Slowly increasing crop yields could stabilise production and increase farm income. Significantly higher crop prices and yields are required, however, for any marked increase in production in Finland. Cereals production would increase relatively more than livestock production, if there were high prices for agricultural products. This is explained by abundant land resources, a high opportunity cost of labour and policies maintaining current dairy and beef production.
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Schönhart, M., & Nadeem, I. (2015). Direct climate change impacts on cattle indicated by THI models. Advances in Animal Biosciences, 6, 17.
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Twardy, S., & Kopacz, M. (2015). The role of permanent grasslands in mountain areas: Study on agri-environmental importance of permanent grasslands – based on research carried out in the upper Dunajec River basin and Grajcarek Stream basin. Falenty-Krakow.
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Toscano, P., Genesio, L., Crisci, A., Vaccari, F. P., Ferrari, E., La Cava, P., et al. (2015). Empirical modelling of regional and national durum wheat quality. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 204, 67–78.
Abstract: The production of durum wheat in the Mediterranean basin is expected to experience increased variability in yield and quality as a consequence of climate change. To assess how environmental variables and agronomic practices affect grain protein content (GPC), a novel approach based on monthly gridded input data has been implemented to develop empirical model, and validated on historical time series to assess its capability to reproduce observed spatial and inter-annual GPC variability. The model was applied in four Italian regions and at the whole national scale and proved reliable and usable for operational purposes also in a forecast ‘real-time’ mode before harvesting. Precipitable water during autumn to winter and air temperature from anthesis to harvest were extremely important influences on GPC; these and additional variables, included in a linear model, were able to account for 95% of the variability in GPC that has occurred in the last 15 years in Italy. Our results are a unique example of the use of modelling as a predictive real-time platform and are a useful tool to understand better and forecast the impacts of future climate change projections on durum wheat production and quality.
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Trnka, M., Hlavinka, P., & Semenov, M. A. (2015). Adaptation options for wheat in Europe will be limited by increased adverse weather events under climate change. J. R. Soc. Interface, 12(112), 20150721.
Abstract: Ways of increasing the production of wheat, the most widely grown cereal crop, will need to be found to meet the increasing demand caused by human population growth in the coming decades. This increase must occur despite the decrease in yield gains now being reported in some regions, increased price volatility and the expected increase in the frequency of adverse weather events that can reduce yields. However, if and how the frequency of adverse weather events will change over Europe, the most important wheat-growing area, has not yet been analysed. Here, we show that the accumulated probability of 11 adverse weather events with the potential to significantly reduce yield will increase markedly across all of Europe. We found that by the end of the century, the exposure of the key European wheat-growing areas, where most wheat production is currently concentrated, may increase more than twofold. However, if we consider the entire arable land area of Europe, a greater than threefold increase in risk was predicted. Therefore, shifting wheat production to new producing regions to reduce the risk might not be possible as the risk of adverse events beyond the key wheat-growing areas increases even more. Furthermore, we found a marked increase in wheat exposure to high temperatures, severe droughts and field inaccessibility compared with other types of adverse events. Our results also showed the limitations of some of the presently debated adaptation options and demonstrated the need for development of region-specific strategies. Other regions of the world could be affected by adverse weather events in the future in a way different from that considered here for Europe. This observation emphasizes the importance of conducting similar analyses for other major wheat regions.
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