Adaptation options for wheat in Europe will be limited by increased adverse weather events under climate change.

Miroslav Trnka,Petr Hlavinka,Mikhail A Semenov

doi:10.1098/rsif.2015.0721

Miroslav Trnka, Petr Hlavinka + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2015.0721

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Abstract

Ways of increasing the production of wheat, the most widely grown cereal crop, will need to be found to meet the increasing demand caused by human population growth in the coming decades. This increase must occur despite the decrease in yield gains now being reported in some regions, increased price volatility and the expected increase in the frequency of adverse weather events that can reduce yields. However, if and how the frequency of adverse weather events will change over Europe, the most important wheat-growing area, has not yet been analysed. Here, we show that the accumulated probability of 11 adverse weather events with the potential to significantly reduce yield will increase markedly across all of Europe. We found that by the end of the century, the exposure of the key European wheat-growing areas, where most wheat production is currently concentrated, may increase more than twofold. However, if we consider the entire arable land area of Europe, a greater than threefold increase in risk was predicted. Therefore, shifting wheat production to new producing regions to reduce the risk might not be possible as the risk of adverse events beyond the key wheat-growing areas increases even more. Furthermore, we found a marked increase in wheat exposure to high temperatures, severe droughts and field inaccessibility compared with other types of adverse events. Our results also showed the limitations of some of the presently debated adaptation options and demonstrated the need for development of region-specific strategies. Other regions of the world could be affected by adverse weather events in the future in a way different from that considered here for Europe. This observation emphasizes the importance of conducting similar analyses for other major wheat regions.

Highlights

Under the HadGEM-RCP8.5 climate scenario, by 2090 only 10% of European wheat production would be affected by a single adverse event less than once every 10 years, while one-half of the arable land area of Europe would be affected at least once every 2 years
Existing studies estimating the effect of climate change on production (e.g. [9,17]) rely either on the set of empirical models or process-based crop models that are not primarily optimized to recognize the impacts of most of adverse events that were considered here
While there has been great effort focused on crop model improvement (e.g. [10]), there has to date not been a concerted effort focusing on the adverse weather events relevant to wheat as such

Summary

Introduction

The 70% increase in food production by 2050 required to feed a population over 9 billion [1] puts pressure on the production of sufficient amount of high-quality food in a sustainable way [2]. Challinor et al [9] estimated that, for 28C of local warming without adaptation, losses in aggregate production could be expected for wheat, rice and maize in both temperate and tropical regions, while using available adaptation options may lead to a 7–15% yield increase. Such yield increases would fall short of the 70% required. While there has been an effort to increase the reliability of future yield predictions

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