Simulation-based indices for a climate-resilient agriculture - insights from ADAPTER

Agriculture is among the sectors that are most vulnerable to extreme weather conditions and climate change. In Germany, the subsequent dry and hot summers 2018, 2019, and 2020 have brought this into the focus of public attention. Agricultural actors like farmers, advisors or companies are concerned with such interannual variability and extremes. Yet, it often remains unclear what long-term adaptation options are most suitable in the context of climate change, mainly because climate projections have uncertainties and are usually not tailored to meet requirements, measures and scales of the individual practicioners. In the ADAPTER project, we explore regional and local change on the weather- and climate-related time scales and together with stakeholders (administration, plant breeders, educators, agricultural advisors), we co-design tailored climate change indices and usable products.

In this contribution, we provide a snapshot view of our stakeholders' requirements regarding information about climate change over the next decades. We then focus on the analysis of three groups of indices based on 85 regional climate model simulations from Coordinated Downscaling Experiments over Europe - EURO-CORDEX: (i) changes in daily temperature variability, (ii) occurrence of agricultural droughts in summer, (iii) compound events of combined dryness and elevated temperatures during the same events. We show that these user-oriented, newly constructed indices can capture relevant changes during important phenological development states of typical crops. Finally, we discuss first implications of our findings for different adaptation strategies in Mid-Europe, such as alternating crop rotations, irrigation strategies or plant breeding. The analysis products presented are interactively and publicly available through a product platform (www.adapter-projekt.de) for agricultural stakeholders.