Stanford, California, USA
May 22, 2014
A new Stanford University study finds that due to an average 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming expected by 2040, yields of wheat and barley across Europe will drop more than 20 percent.
New Stanford research reveals that farmers in Europe will see crop yields affected as global temperatures rise, but that adaptation can help slow the decline for some crops.
For corn, the anticipated loss is roughly 10 percent, the research shows. Farmers of these crops have already seen yield growth slow down since 1980 as temperatures have risen, though other policy and economic factors have also played a role.
"The results clearly showed that modest amounts of climate change can have a big impact on yields of several crops in Europe," said Stanford doctoral student Frances Moore, who conducted the research with David Lobell, an associate professor of environmental Earth system science.
Moore, a student in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, described the results as somewhat surprising because Europe is fairly cool. "So you might think it would benefit from moderate amounts of warming," she said. "Our next step was to actually measure the potential of European farmers to adapt to these impacts."
Moore and Lobell analyzed yield and profit records from thousands of farms between 1989 and 2009. These originated in the European Union's annual Farmer Accountancy Data Network survey. Combining detailed climate records with the farm data, they were able to understand how yields and profits have changed over time. By comparing yields in warmer and cooler parts of Europe, they could predict how adaptation may help European farmers in the coming decades. Their research is detailed in the latest issue of the journal Nature Climate Change.
"By adaptation, we mean a range of options based on existing technologies, such as switching varieties of a crop, installing irrigation or growing a different crop, one better suited to warmer temperatures," said Lobell, the associate director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford. "These things have been talked about for a long time, but the novelty of this study was using past data to quantify the actual potential of adaptation to reduce climate change impacts. We find that in some cases adaptation could substantially reduce impacts, but in other cases the potential may be very limited with current technologies."
According to the analysis, corn has the highest adaptation potential. Moore and Lobell predict that corn farmers can reduce yield losses by as much as 87 percent through long-term adaptation.
As Moore pointed out, three key areas of uncertainty make it difficult to predict the future of crop yields in Europe. Most scientists focus on the uncertainty around future climate conditions, but the Stanford team found that the biggest issues are often how quickly farmers in Europe will adapt to climate change (adaptation uncertainty) and how crop yields will respond to climate change (response uncertainty).
In future research, Moore and Lobell hope to focus on measuring how quickly farmers are adapting to changing temperatures.
"This paper has shown that crops in Europe are sensitive to warming and that adaptation can be important in reducing that impact," Moore said. "The next question is how quickly farmers will use the available options for adapting. Europe has already seen a lot of warming, so we should expect to already see adaptation if farmers are quick to respond to climate signals."
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Adaptation potential of European agriculture in response to climate change
Frances C. Moore & David B. Lobell
Nature Climate Change (2014) doi:10.1038/nclimate2228 Received 07 October 2013 Accepted 03 April 2014 Published online 18 May 2014
ABSTRACT
Projecting the impacts of climate change on agriculture requires knowing or assuming how farmers will adapt. However, empirical estimates of the effectiveness of this private adaptation are scarce and the sensitivity of impact assessments to adaptation assumptions is not well understood1, 2. Here we assess the potential effectiveness of private farmer adaptation in Europe by jointly estimating both short-run and long-run response functions using time-series and cross-sectional variation in subnational yield and profit data. The difference between the impacts of climate change projected using the short-run (limited adaptation) and long-run (substantial adaptation) response curves can be interpreted as the private adaptation potential. We find high adaptation potential for maize to future warming but large negative effects and only limited adaptation potential for wheat and barley. Overall, agricultural profits could increase slightly under climate change if farmers adapt but could decrease in many areas if there is no adaptation. Decomposing the variance in 2040 projected yields and farm profits using an ensemble of 13 climate model runs, we find that the rate at which farmers will adapt to rising temperatures is an important source of uncertainty.
by Laura Seaman, communications and external relations manager for Stanford's Center on Food Security and the Environment, a joint program of Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
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