Climate change - threats or opportunities for agriculture?
Year: 2008
Type: book
Abstract: Our climate is changing and will continue to do so in the future. This has a large potential impact on agriculture. Here we present case studies for two major agricultural regions in the world, Argentina and Australia in which a simulation model was used to explore the potential impact of recent and future climate change on wheat production and externalities. Using the well tested simulation model APSIM-NWheat indicated that the large increases in rainfall in the Pampas of Argentina have contributed to some of the increase in yield potential of wheat in the current cropped region, but less than might have been anticipated. The increases would also allow the extension of profitable wheat cropping into currently non-cropped areas. Soil water storage capacity and managing the stored water over summer will be critical for the wheat crop to benefit from increased summer rainfall. In Western Australia, despite a large decline in rainfall, simulated yields based on the actual weather data did not drop, because rainfall changes occurred mainly in June and July, a period when rainfall often exceeds crop demand and large amounts of water are usually lost by deep drainage. These studies highlight that the impact of climate change is often not linearly related to rainfall and that the complexity of the change, the rainfall distribution and the crop water use need to be considered for realistic climate change impact assessments. The examples show that there will be both threats and opportunities for agriculture due to climate change, depending on the actual change and other systems parameters.
Language: Korean
Subfield: Agronomy and Crop Science
Domain: Life Sciences
SDGs: Climate action, Zero hunger
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2161184169