Climate risk and vulnerability assessment for agriculture in Ukraine

Agriculture in Ukraine is one of the most important economic sectors which has an impact on global food security with over 600 million people dependent on the export of crops from Ukraine. It became even more obvious after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and blockage of Ukrainian seaports that triggered a global food crisis in 2022. In the last year 2024, Ukraine reached an export level of USD 24.5 billion and exported 78.3 million tonnes of agricultural products according to the Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food of Ukraine, which accounted for 59% of total exports. At the same time, extreme events associated with climate change caused the second biggest losses for agriculture in Ukraine after the Russian war damage. One year of drought in 2020 caused two-fold more economic losses in agriculture than caused by all other hydrometeorological extreme events in the previous 10 years. Therefore, developing a strategy for adaptation to climate change in agriculture is a vital problem for Ukraine, and it should start with an assessment of possible future vulnerability and risks for the sector.

In our work, we used an updated methodological approach based on the presented in the IPCC AR6 (2021-2022). Namely, we estimate the change in 32 Climatic impact drivers (CIDs) grouped into 5 categories: heat and cold, wet and dry, snow, wind, and coastal. Those CIDs were calculated mainly from the ensembles of up to 34 Regional Climate Models (RCMs) from the Euro-CORDEX with the maximum available for Ukraine resolution of 0.1^o. In addition, we used the IPCC AR6 Interactive Atlas and Copernicus database for some of the CIDs. We assessed vulnerability and risks based on projections for two scenarios (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5) for three future periods (2021-2040, 2041-2060, and 2081-2100) vs 1991-2010.

The methodological approach included expert judgement on sensitivity to changes in all 32 CIDs for two of the main sub-sectors in Ukrainian agriculture: crop farming and livestock. This sensitivity is a set of weighting coefficients, their sum was chosen for the convenience of comparing vulnerability between sectors and was equal to 10 units. Note that the obtained sensitivity coefficients are irrelevant to geographical location and purely attribute of assets, therefore, it could be used for all territories where such crops and animals are grown. But what is relevant to locations is the impacts of future change in CIDs which we got in all over 7300 grid points for Ukraine and categorized within obtained limits as negligible, low, medium, high, and very high. Vulnerability and risks were calculated based on the developed original procedure in the assumption that exposure and adaptive capacity are both equal to unit, that is an asset is present in all grid points and has minimum adaptive capacity.

Our results are presented in maps, diagrams and tables for 8 regions including The Carpathians and the Crimean mountains and coastal for the Black Sea and the Azov Sea. This research is a part of the project “Promoting Green Deal Readiness in the Eastern Partnership Countries” (PROGRESS)