Published in ERW, 7 Sep 2015
Climate change will affect agriculture, but the fine detail is tricky to determine. Many studies exploring the response of crops have looked at distant futures, typically the latter half of the century when temperatures are expected to be significantly higher. This is useful for assessing mitigation policies that should reduce warming, but not so helpful for analyzing shorter term changes in the climate that agriculture could perhaps adapt to temporarily.
In the short term, projections for temperature increase do not differ greatly between climate scenarios, although projections for precipitation do. That’s why, Marcello Donatelli at the Research Centre for Industrial Crops in Bologna, Italy, and colleagues explored the impact of the variability between emissions-scenario realizations up to 2030, and the benefit of adaptation techniques. The researchers used climate-model projections as an input for crop models that simulated different types of agricultural management, considering the effects of weather, soil moisture and carbon dioxide, but not pests, diseases or nutrient limitations. […]
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