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Stefan Olin

Project coordinator

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Understanding the weather signal in national crop-yield variability

Author

  • Katja Frieler
  • Bernhard Schauberger
  • Almut Arneth
  • Juraj Balkovič
  • James Chryssanthacopoulos
  • Delphine Deryng
  • Joshua Elliott
  • Christian Folberth
  • Nikolay Khabarov
  • Christoph Müller
  • Stefan Olin
  • Thomas Alan Miller Pugh
  • Sibyll Schaphoff
  • Jacob Schewe
  • Erwin Schmid
  • Lila Warszawski
  • Anders Levermann

Summary, in English

Year-to-year variations in crop yields can have major impacts on the livelihoods of subsistence farmers and may trigger significant global price fluctuations, with severe consequences for people in developing countries. Fluctuations can be induced by weather conditions, management decisions, weeds, diseases, and pests. Although an explicit quantification and deeper understanding of weather-induced crop-yield variability is essential for adaptation strategies, so far it has only been addressed by empirical models. Here, we provide conservative estimates of the fraction of reported national yield variabilities that can be attributed to weather by state-of-the-art, process-based crop model simulations. We find that observed weather variations can explain more than 50% of the variability in wheat yields in Australia, Canada, Spain, Hungary, and Romania. For maize, weather sensitivities exceed 50% in seven countries, including the United States. The explained variance exceeds 50% for rice in Japan and South Korea and for soy in Argentina. Avoiding water stress by simulating yields assuming full irrigation shows that water limitation is a major driver of the observed variations in most of these countries. Identifying the mechanisms leading to crop-yield fluctuations is not only fundamental for dampening fluctuations, but is also important in the context of the debate on the attribution of loss and damage to climate change. Since process-based crop models not only account for weather influences on crop yields, but also provide options to represent human-management measures, they could become essential tools for differentiating these drivers, and for exploring options to reduce future yield fluctuations.

Department/s

  • Dept of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science
  • MERGE: ModElling the Regional and Global Earth system
  • BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate

Publishing year

2017-06-20

Language

English

Pages

605-616

Publication/Series

Earth's Future

Volume

5

Issue

6

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

John Wiley & Sons Inc.

Topic

  • Environmental Sciences related to Agriculture and Land-use
  • Climate Research

Keywords

  • Crop yield variability
  • Weather sensitivity

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 2328-4277