How Climate Change Can Transform Future Agriculture

Climate change is having a big impact on our environment. But it also has the potential to completely transform agriculture. Now, scientists have taken a closer look at future predictions to determine exactly what the agriculture business might face in the coming years.

"There is a lot of uncertainty in how climate change will impact agriculture, and what adaptations will be needed," said David Leclere, who led the study, in a news release. "Our new study is the first to specifically examine at a global scale whether the adaptations required from agricultural systems are in the transformational range, and whether these transformations are required, but also in how many scenarios, it lays the groundwork for countries to better plan for the impacts of climate change."

The researchers conducted a global scenario analysis that covered nine different climate scenarios, 18 crops and four crop management systems. They also looked at the interactions between crop production, consumption, prices and trade.

So what did they find? It turns out that impacts on crop yields of changes in climate, such as increased temperature, changed precipitation and increased CO2, resulted in an 18 percent decline in global caloric production from cropland, to as much as a three percent increase by 2050.

The researchers also point out the importance of adaptations, such as moving production from one region to another. In addition, they stress the importance of limited water resource for future food security in a changing climate. In fact, a large part of the world may need to increase irrigation by more than 25 percent.

"After decades of global research efforts, scientists are only starting to understand the implications of climate change for the future global food system," said Michael Obersteiner, co-author of the new study. "We need to explore new and uncertainty-proof paradigms for long-term decision-making, and we also need a much better understanding of how to manage crucial resources such as water, which may become dramatically scarcer much earlier than previously thought."

The findings are published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

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