Page 244 - Climate Change and Food Systems

climate change and food systems: global assessments and implications for food security and trade
figure 3
Climate change impacts on temperature (T) and precipitation (P) change compared to the base period for 2020s and 2050s. The data present the mean of four CMIP-3 GCM integrations under IPCC SRES A1FI scenario
Caucasus, and western Siberian regions, and by 0.2-0.7 days per decade in the Ural and Povolzhie regions (Sirotenko et al., 2007). The highest increase in ETS, over 120 ˚C per decade, was observed in Ukraine, with 57-77 ˚C per decade growth in central Chernozem, northern Caucasus, and western Siberian regions, and lower growth or even decrease in the Ural and Povolzhie regions (Sirotenko et al., 2007).
We estimated projected future changes of climate over the territory of Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation and Ukraine in the 2020s
and 2050s as deviations from the base values
at the end of the Soviet period (1980s); the
base period was selected for compatibility with earlier projections of climate change impacts on agriculture in the Russian Federation (Alcamo et al., 2007). The following parameters were computed as mean values from the ensemble of four GCMs (CGCM2, CSIROmk2, ECHam4 and DOE PCM):
the change in annual and warm period temperature and precipitation; potential evapotranspiration;
and growing degree days at base temperature of 10 ˚C (GDD10). We computed the values of each parameter for the entire territory of interest, divided into 0.5˚ geographical latitude and longitude cells with a regular grid (Figure 3). The values for each country were then combined as a weighted mean with weights equal to percentage of agricultural lands in each cell (Table 6).
In the 2020s, the temperature increase in all three countries – with lower increase in Ukraine (Figure 3) – would be followed by a correspondent increase in potential evapotranspiration, by
15-18 percent. The increase in precipitation,
by 3-6 percent in the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan and by 0-2.3 percent in Ukraine,
can partially compensate for an increased water deficit; however, the increase in precipitation is projected mostly for the cold part of the year, with
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