Climate change impacts on agriculture in 2050 under a range of plausible socioeconomic and emissions scenarios

By K. Wiebe, H. Lotze-Campen, R. Sands, Andrzej Tabeau, Dominique van der Mensbrugghe, A. Biewald, Benjamin Leon Bodirsky, S. Islam, A. Kavallari, D. Mason-D’Croz and 6 more. 2015

293 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Previous studies have combined climate, crop and economic models to examine the impact of climate change on agricultural production and food security, but results have varied widely due to differences in models, scenarios and input data. Recent work has examined (and narrowed) these differences through systematic model intercomparison using a high-emissions pathway to highlight the differences. This paper extends that analysis to explore a range of plausible socioeconomic scenarios and emission pathways. Results from multiple climate and economic models are combined to examine the global and regional impacts of climate change on agricultural yields, area, production, consumption, prices and trade for coarse grains, rice, wheat, oilseeds and sugar crops to 2050. We find that climate impacts on global average yields, area, production and consumption are similar across shared socioeconomic pathways (SSP 1, 2 and 3, as we implement them based on population, income and productivity drivers), except when changes in trade policies are included. Impacts on trade and prices are higher for SSP 3 than SSP 2, and higher for SSP 2 than for SSP 1. Climate impacts for all variables are similar across low to moderate emissions pathways (RCP 4.5 and RCP 6.0), but increase for a higher emissions pathway (RCP 8.5). It is important to note that these global averages may hide regional variations. Projected reductions in agricultural yields due to climate change by 2050 are larger for some crops than those estimated for the past half century, but smaller than projected increases to 2050 due to rising demand and intrinsic productivity growth. Results illustrate the sensitivity of climate change impacts to differences in socioeconomic and emissions pathways. Yield impacts increase at high emissions levels and vary with changes in population, income and technology, but are reduced in all cases by endogenous changes in prices and other variables.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6bb508d0002751a87264d5a7b56eb61fd16dff41

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Citations in the corpus

Climate Change, Global Food Security, and the U.S. Food System (2015, methodology): “In an extension of previous AgMIP research, five global economic models extend their analysis to look at the effects of trade (Wiebe et al. 2015).”
Comparing impacts of climate change and mitigation on global agriculture by 2050 (2018, background): “Wiebe et al (2015) extended these analyses to three SSPs and three RCPs.”
Fossil-fueled development (SSP5): An energy and resource intensive scenario for the 21st century (2017, unknown): “While much of this analysis is subject to concurrent (e.g., Wiebe et al., 2015) or future research, this study already presents a set of SSP5-based climate change mitigation scenarios.”
Constraints for adopting climate-smart agricultural practices among smallholder farmers in Southeast Kenya (2021, background): “The biophysical and socio-economic effects of anthropogenic climate change show large spatial variation globally (Wiebe et al., 2015), while responses to changes in global food security discourse emphasize homogeneous technical responses in regional and national policies.”
Can sub-Saharan Africa feed itself? (2016, methodology): “Total annual cereal demand per capita, for each of the five cereals and each country, in 2050 were retrieved from IMPACT modeling results (22, 56).”
The International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT): Model Description for Version 3 (2015, background): “• IFPRI-IWMI book World Water and Food to 2025: Dealing with Scarcity (Rosegrant, Cai, and Cline 2002) • Food security and climate change (Nelson et al. 2010) • Global assessments such as the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (2009), World Development Re”
Effect of Fertility Policy Changes on the Population Structure and Economy of China: From the Perspective of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (2019, methodology): “…been applied to assess the impacts of the changing environment on water scarcity, agriculture, flooding, and the sensitivities of future CO2 emissions to socioeconomic development (Arnell & Lloyd‐Hughes, 2014; Hanasaki et al., 2013; Marangoni et al., 2017; Schewe et al., 2014; Wiebe et al., 2015).”
Impacts of land use, population, and climate change on global food security (2020, background): “Adverse impacts of climate change are particularly strong for oilseeds (Wiebe et al., 2015) which could contribute to regional variation in undernourishment prevalence.”