Page 154 - Climate Change and Food Systems

climate change and food systems: global assessments and implications for food security and trade
figure 11
Scales and levels of organization and their interactions in integrated assessments of climate change impacts on agricultural production and food security
5. Recommendations
for improving impact assessment methodology
The presentation of outcomes from various
studies on key impacts for selected key crops
and agricultural regions in Europe has shown
that, while there is often good agreement on the direction of impact, there are also considerable discrepancies regarding the magnitude of impact and the spatiotemporal patterns of change. The crop modelling component of FACCE MACSUR recently launched a study with the objective of examining the present state of crop modelling for assessing CC risks to food production. The study’s emphasis is on the use of crop models as part of IAM (Ewert et al., forthcoming.
Preliminary results of that investigation indicate that, while there has been considerable progress in modelling CC impacts on crops, this largely reflects the improved sensitivity of crop models
to CC factors, in particular to climate extremes and their interaction with various crop growth and development processes (e.g. Asseng et al., 2013; Lobell et al., 2013). Many other aspects required for a detailed CC risk assessment for European agriculture and food security (see www.macsur.eu; Rötter et al., 2013b) are less well represented. Considerable gaps still exist between the variety of data and information demanded by IAM and what crop models can offer.
The lesson to be learned from this and other reviews is that it is necessary to put substantial efforts into improving crop simulation and other biophysical and bio-economic impact assessment techniques concurrently (see also other chapters in this volume). It is highly unlikely that such challenges can be met by individual research groups. Rather, concerted international efforts are required to guide the process of improving crop models and other biophyscial impact assessment techniques for further use in bio-economic
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