Modeling Climate Impacts on Agriculture and Adaptation by the Agro-Economy
Agricultural production is a critical sector of the domestic and global economy that is affected directly by climate change. The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP)—supported in part by DOE, NASA, USAID, and USDA—is a major international effort linking the climate, crop, and economic modeling communities to produce improved projections of climate impacts on the agricultural sector, thereby enhancing capacity to prepare for and respond to these climate-driven changes. To learn more about AgMIP, visit: http://goo.gl/ZmU82S
As part of AgMIP, a group of researchers used a suite of global agro-economic models to simulate potential economic responses to future climate change and crop growth scenarios from the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (see related Highlight 10). For the scenarios studied, which assumed a high greenhouse gas emissions pathway to the year 2050, they found that climate-driven reductions in the global productivity of major field crops will likely drive changes in crop yield, cropland area, and location of production. International trade could reduce variation in productivity levels to a much narrower range of changes in global crop consumption. However, maintaining crop consumption could come at a cost: all nine economic models in this study projected an increase in the inflation-adjusted price of crops (see graph on next page).
This graph shows projected impacts of climate change on crop productivity (darker blue) and related agricultural and economic responses. Black dots indicate the average percent change in each variable by 2050, relative to no climate change; the height of each column shows the range of results across climate, crop, and economic models. These results represent global averages for major field crops including wheat, rice, coarse grains, and oil seeds. (Credit: Adapted from Nelson et al., 2014)