Effects of crop growing season length adaptation on economic climate change impacts in the agricultural sector

The effect of agronomic R&D and field-scale management decisions in response to climate change is only imperfectly modeled in both crop and agriculture sector models at global scale, contributing to the large uncertainty in future projections of climate change impacts on the agricultural sector. For example, the observed large diversity in the growing season length of individual crops across locations under present climate owes for a significant part to a choice of crop varieties adapted to local growing climate conditions, and mobilizing such a principle (adoption of alternative existing crop varieties in a location as growing conditions change, developement of new crop varieties better adapted to the changing growing conditions) could be a significant adaptation lever for agricultural systems under future climate change (e.g., Parent et al 2018). To date no global projection of the climate change impacts on the agricultural sector has included this effect, but global crop yield projections recently became available and indicated large potential impacts (e.g., Zabel et al 2021). In this study, we link the later projections to the GLOBIOM global agricultural sector model (Havlik et al 2014, Leclere et al 2014), and will present economic impacts on the agricultural sector while accounting for uncertainties associated to the extent to which existing and newly developed cultivar could be adopted, as well as to various GHG emission scenarios, climate models and crop models. 

References: Parent et al., 2018, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1720716115; Zabel et a., 2021, DOI: 10.1111/gcb.15649; Havlik et al, 2014, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1308044111; Leclere et al, 2014, DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/9/12/124018