Page 129 - 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
figure 1 a-b
Main components of climate change impact assessment methodology for agriculture (a) and uncertainty and error propagation along the biophysical model chain (b) [(b) modified from Wilby & Dessai (2010) and KLIWAS, unpublished)]
3. To discuss potential implications of these impact projections for European key crops in terms of global trade and food security; and
4. To discuss uncertainties, with particular focus on biophysical impact projections, and describe necessary improvements in methodology and projections.
While we will concentrate on the biophysical
part of the CC impact assessment methodology (Figure 1a), we also include an overview of state- of-the art climate projections for Europe, including regional variations (Section 1.2). Section 2 presents the different approaches to biophysical assessment of CC impacts, discusses their strengths and weaknesses, and describes recent advancements. Section 3 deals with selected impacts for key crops, in terms of CC effects on land suitability
for their cultivation as well as on yield and yield
stability. Section 4 deals with uncertainties and provides an overview of the degree and relative importance of the various sources of uncertainty (Figure 1b) inherent to the impact projections
at different scales. Finally, Section 5 gives recommendations for future research.
1.2 Climate change projections for Europe
Climate change projections and their inherent uncertainties
Changes in climate are the result of changes
in greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations and other external forcing factors, which are largely dependent on future anthropogenic emissions. The projections of climate models for changes in climatic variables attributable to a given external
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