Assessing progressive climate impacts

Background

There are several areas the developing world subjected to food insecurity, poverty, undernourishment, partly due to a lack of governance and of technologies for a sustainable production. In food-insecure areas in Africa, the limited access to technology (i.e. high yielding targeted and improved cultivars and management practices) causes soil erosion, decreases in yield and hence increases poverty. Even high-production developing countries have severe food security and poverty problems. Several studies point out that Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are amongst the most vulnerable areas to climate change. Recent studies in food security-related issues indicate that these regions are to increase their instability in food supplies and therefore are likely to be more insecure. Urgent action is required as per the establishment of appropriate adaptation strategies to cope with negative or capitalize positive effects of changes in climates.

This project aims to use crop models for assessing the impacts of changes in baseline climates on the production of the most important crops within the three CCAFS regions. Proposed methods are the usage of an empirical niche-based approach named EcoCrop and the large area mechanistic model named GLAM. Making use of temporally disaggregated and spatially downscaled timeseries of climate for both a baseline period and a set of future scenarios (derived from GCM outputs), the impacts of future climatic conditions on crop yields will be assessed and adaptation measures will be proposed. The work is outlined to be completed within a 3-year time frame, with most of the calibration going on in the first year, and all the application being finished by the second year, with the third year being spent in adaptation strategies development.

Objectives

• To calibrate two crop modeling approaches under current conditions for a set of important crops in the three CCAFS study regions (so that at least 50% of production is covered)
• To assess the impact of future climates (i.e. 2030s) on these crops and propose adaptation strategies

Activities

• Harvest climate and agricultural data for model calibration
• Study and understand crop modeling approaches
• Identify target production systems
• Select crops to study
• Start calibrating crop models

Outputs

• Climate database to be used in crop model calibration
• Agricultural data database in suitable format for analysis automation
• One or two crop models calibrated

Partners

This project will be done in collaboration between the University of Leeds (UK), the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), and CCAFS Theme 1 (Adaptation to Progressive Climate Change)

Timeframe

2010 - 2013

Location/Scope

All CCAFS Regions