Projections of climate change impacts on crop production: A global and a Nordic perspective

Abstract

Global climate is changing and food production is very sensitive to weather and climate variations. Global assessments of climate change impacts on food production have been made since the early 1990s, initially with little attention to the uncertainties involved. Although there has been abundant analysis of uncertainties in future greenhouse gas emissions and their impacts on the climate system, uncertainties related to the way climate change projections are scaled down as appropriate for different analyses and in modelling crop responses to climate change, have been neglected. This review paper mainly addresses uncertainties in crop impact modelling and possibilities to reduce them. We specifically aim to (i) show ranges of projected climate change-induced impacts on crop yields, (ii) give recommendations on use of emission scenarios, climate models, regionalization and ensemble crop model simulations for different purposes and (iii) discuss improvements and a few ‘known unknowns’ affecting crop impact projections.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• impact projection
• food production
• uncertainty
• crop simulation model

Acknowledgements

We thank our colleagues at MTT, T. Palosuo and H. Lehtonen, and T. Carter and N. Pirttioja at SYKE, for fruitful discussions. The Academy of Finland, project A-LA-CARTE (decision no. 140846) and MTT strategic project MODAGS are acknowledged for funding the research.