Implications of climate change for agricultural productivity in the early twenty-first century

By J. Gornall, R. Betts, E. Burke, R. Clark, J. Camp, K. Willett, A. Wiltshire. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2010

1,014 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper reviews recent literature concerning a wide range of processes through which climate change could potentially impact global-scale agricultural productivity, and presents projections of changes in relevant meteorological, hydrological and plant physiological quantities from a climate model ensemble to illustrate key areas of uncertainty. Few global-scale assessments have been carried out, and these are limited in their ability to capture the uncertainty in climate projections, and omit potentially important aspects such as extreme events and changes in pests and diseases. There is a lack of clarity on how climate change impacts on drought are best quantified from an agricultural perspective, with different metrics giving very different impressions of future risk. The dependence of some regional agriculture on remote rainfall, snowmelt and glaciers adds to the complexity. Indirect impacts via sea-level rise, storms and diseases have not been quantified. Perhaps most seriously, there is high uncertainty in the extent to which the direct effects of CO2 rise on plant physiology will interact with climate change in affecting productivity. At present, the aggregate impacts of climate change on global-scale agricultural productivity cannot be reliably quantified.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/db41539aad0d7436ad0fcf54a6ceaeb238704dcc

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Global and Planetary Change

In Plant Science

Citations in the corpus

Global crop yield response to extreme heat stress under multiple climate change futures (2014, background): “Third, PEGASUS does not include negative impacts related to crop pest and disease factors, which have yet to be explicitly examined in crop models [1], or crop interactions with pollutants such as ozone, and nutrient–CO2 interactions.”
The future of the global food system (2010, background): “Food security and health are closely intertwined, as discussed by Hawkesworth et al. (2010).”
Crop modelling for integrated assessment of risk to food production from climate change (2015, background): “For example, increased climate variability is likely to lead to higher variability in crop performance (Gornall et al., 2010; Trnka et al., 2011).”
A review on relationship between climate change and agriculture (2015, background): “As Lobell et al.[19] study in 12 food-insecure regions of the world reported that climate change could significantly impact agricultural production and food security up to 2030 particularly for sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia due to both changes in mean temperatures and rainfall as well as increas”
Food security and sustainable intensification (2014, background): “In the future, climate change will affect food production both by causing gradual changes in temperature, rainfall and so forth, as well as by triggering extreme weather events [28].”
It is time to bridge the gap between exploring and exploiting: prospects for utilizing intraspecific genetic variation to optimize arthropods for augmentative pest control – a review (2017, background): “…species (Whalon et al., 2011); (3) the emergence of novel pests, by accidental or climate change-associated introduction of exotic pest insects (Gornall et al., 2010); and (4) a positive feedback loop of the use of biological control: when natural enemies are more commonly released against one…”