Climate change: Impact on agriculture and costs of adaptation

Abstract

The Challenge: The unimpeded growth of greenhouse gas emissions is raising the earth's temperature. The consequences include melting glaciers, more precipitation, more and more extreme weather events, and shifting seasons. The accelerating pace of climate change, combined with global population and income growth, threatens food security everywhere. Agriculture is extremely vulnerable to climate change. Higher temperatures eventually reduce yields of desirable crops while encouraging weed and pest proliferation. Changes in precipitation patterns increase the likelihood of short-run crop failures and long-run production declines. Although there will be gains in some crops in some regions of the world, the overall impacts of climate change on agriculture are expected to be negative, threatening global food security. Populations in the developing world, which are already vulnerable and food insecure, are likely to be the most seriously affected. In 2005, nearly half of the economically active population in developing countries-2.5 billion people- relied on agriculture for its livelihood. Today, 75 percent of the world's poor live in rural areas. This Food Policy Report presents research results that quantify the climate-change impacts mentioned above, assesses the consequences for food security, and estimates the investments that would offset the negative consequences for human well-being. This analysis brings together, for the first time, detailed modeling of crop growth under climate change with insights from an extremely detailed global agriculture model, using two climate scenarios to simulate future climate.Policy ReportPRIFPRI1EPT

Climate hotspots: key vulnerable regions, climate change and limits to warming

“…Observed negative effects of climate change on crop production in some regions (Auffhammer et al 2006;Lobell and Field 2007) and new assessments of projections and uncertainties in relation to the role of CO 2 fertilization indicate a risk that global food production could be under more pressure from climate change than previously estimated (Lobell and Field 2008;Leakey 2009;Nelson et al 2009;Rost et al 2009;Schlenker and Roberts 2009).…”

Climate Change and Agriculture: An Integrated Approach to Evaluate Economy-Wide Effects for Turkey

“…A more detailed survey on integrated approach can be found in Hertel and Rosch (2010), Palatnik and Roson (2009) and Cretegny (2009). GCMs (Bosello & Zhang, 2005;Nelson et al, 2009;Rosegrant et al, 2008;Thurlow, Zhu, & Diao, 2012), stochastic drought and flood models (Pauw, Thurlow, & Van Seventer, 2010), global environmental models (Calzadilla et al, 2011) and agro-ecological models (Fernandes, Soliman, Confalonieri, Donatelli, & Tubiello, 2012) are used to project main physical impacts under different climate scenarios. Then these changes are fed into special impact models, such as crop growth models (Bosello & Zhang, 2005), biophysical models (Ciscar et al, 2009;Nelson et al, 2009;Rosegrant et al, 2008;Thurlow et al, 2012) and econometric models (Pauw et al, 2010) that are used to translate the results of GCMs to economic impacts.…”

“…GCMs (Bosello & Zhang, 2005;Nelson et al, 2009;Rosegrant et al, 2008;Thurlow, Zhu, & Diao, 2012), stochastic drought and flood models (Pauw, Thurlow, & Van Seventer, 2010), global environmental models (Calzadilla et al, 2011) and agro-ecological models (Fernandes, Soliman, Confalonieri, Donatelli, & Tubiello, 2012) are used to project main physical impacts under different climate scenarios. Then these changes are fed into special impact models, such as crop growth models (Bosello & Zhang, 2005), biophysical models (Ciscar et al, 2009;Nelson et al, 2009;Rosegrant et al, 2008;Thurlow et al, 2012) and econometric models (Pauw et al, 2010) that are used to translate the results of GCMs to economic impacts. Lastly, partial equilibrium models (Nelson et al, 2009;Rosegrant et al, 2008) and CGE models at the global (Bosello & Zhang, 2005;Calzadilla et al, 2011), regional (Ciscar et al, 2009;Fernandes et al, 2012) or country (Pauw et al, 2010;Thurlow et al, 2012) level are frequently used for the economic analysis.…”

“…Then these changes are fed into special impact models, such as crop growth models (Bosello & Zhang, 2005), biophysical models (Ciscar et al, 2009;Nelson et al, 2009;Rosegrant et al, 2008;Thurlow et al, 2012) and econometric models (Pauw et al, 2010) that are used to translate the results of GCMs to economic impacts. Lastly, partial equilibrium models (Nelson et al, 2009;Rosegrant et al, 2008) and CGE models at the global (Bosello & Zhang, 2005;Calzadilla et al, 2011), regional (Ciscar et al, 2009;Fernandes et al, 2012) or country (Pauw et al, 2010;Thurlow et al, 2012) level are frequently used for the economic analysis.…”

“…The common findings of the studies that are using integrated approach are two folds: Climate change effects on the economy and particularly on agricultural production are significant at the global (Calzadilla et al, 2011;Nelson et al, 2009) and regional (Fernandes et al, 2012) levels, especially for developing countries (Bosello & Zhang, 2005;Pauw et al, 2010;Thurlow et al, 2012) where the share of agricultural production in gross domestic production (GDP) is relatively higher. Second, the negative effects accelerate in the second half of the twenty-first century (Ciscar et al, 2009;Fernandes et al, 2012).…”