Abstract
This paper presents the design and use of Representative Agricultural Pathways (RAPs) in regional integrated assessment of climate impacts. In the first part of the paper, we describe the role of pathways and scenarios in regional integrated assessment as well as the three RAPs developed for a study of dryland wheat-based systems in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. We use this example to illustrate the challenges associated with the development and implementation of RAPs, including the engagement of research team and stakeholders, the dimensionality problem in integrated assessment, incorporation of economic data and quantification of uncertainties. In the second part, we illustrate the use of RAPs in the study of climate impacts on dryland wheat-based systems. Results show that the direct impacts of future climate projections through crop yields provide the largest source of uncertainty in the climate impact and vulnerability analysis, but the indirect impacts of climate change through price projections embedded in RAPs also play an important role in the analysis. We conclude that in addition to being an essential element in designing an integrated assessment at the regional level, the RAPs development process can facilitate stakeholder engagement and improve communication of climate impact assessments.
Highlights
Future scenarios play a key role in climate impact assessments based on computer simulation
The Representative Agricultural Pathway (RAP) Design Process in the REACCH Project Following the logical structure of Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) and Shared Socio-economic Pathway (SSP) for global assessments, RAPs are intended to provide a logically consistent set of bio-physical and socio-economic drivers to be used with the climate data generated by downscaling outputs from global climate models to the regional level (Valdivia et al, 2015)
We illustrate the use of RAPs in regional integrated assessment as implemented in the REACCH project
Summary
Future scenarios play a key role in climate impact assessments based on computer simulation. In addition to its use for global integrated assessment modeling, an aim of the SSP framework is to provide the basis for more detailed sector and regional (national or sub-national) analysis. The Agricultural Model Inter-comparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) developed the concept of Representative Agricultural Pathways (RAPs) to provide the additional agricultural detail needed to implement global and regional agricultural assessments (Rosenzweig et al, 2013; Rosenzweig and Hillel, 2015; Antle et al, 2017a). RAPs are projections of plausible future biophysical and socioeconomic conditions used to carry out climate impact assessments for agriculture (Claessens et al, 2012; Valdivia et al, 2015)
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