Page 127 - Climate Change and Food Systems

chapter 4
An overview of climate change impact on crop production and its variability in Europe, related uncertainties and research challenges
Reimund Rötter and Jukka Höhn1
main chapter messages
■ Biophysical impacts of climate change (CC) on agricultural potential and yields have been assessed by different approaches, each with its limitations, but rarely used in combination.
■ Considerable data constraints prevent rapid progress regarding model improvement.
■ According to prevailing CC projections, the direction of most projected impacts on crop production potential and yields indicate gains especially for northern Europe, and little change for southern Europe; while many impact projections agree on this, differences in to the magnitude of change are huge.
■ For Europe as a whole, crop production potential is expected to increase under CC, when assuming unchanged climatic variability.
■ Uncertainties regarding socio-economic and CC scenarios are considerable – and in conjunction with imperfect impact models, this eventually results in a huge uncertainty range for CC impact projections.
■ Risk to global food production is highest when adverse weather conditions occur simultaneously in several important agricultural regions.
■ CC impact assessment methodologies need to focus on adaptation; further improvements of integrated approaches are required to better capture the impacts of climate variability and various extremes events.
■ Most importantly, methodologies need to become truly integrated (IAM), multi-scale and transdisciplinary to address CC adaptation and mitigation adequately.
1
Plant Production Research, MTT Agrifood Research Finland, Findand
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