Abstract
Food security is a crucial issue in the Sahel and could be endangered by climate change and demographic pressure during the 21st century. Higher temperatures and changes in rainfall induced by global warming are threatening rainfed agriculture in this region while the population is expected to increase approximately three-fold until 2050. Our study quantifies the impact of climate change on food security by combining climate modelling (16 models from CMIP5), crop yield (simulated by agronomic model, SARRA-O) and demographic evolution (provided by UN projection) under two future climatic scenarios. We simulate yield for the main crops in five countries in West Africa and estimate the population pressure on crop production to assess the number of available cereal production per capita. We found that, although uncertain, the African monsoon evolution leads to an increase of rainfall in Eastern Sahel and a decrease in Western Sahel under the RCP8.5 (Representative Concentration Pathway) scenario from IPCC, leading to the higher temperature increase by the end of the 21st century. With regard to the abundance of food for the inhabitants, all the scenarios in each country show that in 2050, local agricultural production will be below 50 kg per capita. This situation can have impact on crop import and regional migration.
Highlights
The Sudano-Sahelian zone is one of the most vulnerable regions in the world to climate hazards
After the presentation of data and methodology with the presentation of Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios; in Section 3, we describe the results in terms of the evolution of seasonal climate, crop yield and country production by the inhabitant
By computing various climatic indices such as seasonal rainfall, dry spells and onset of the rains, that is demonstrated that this technique strongly reduces the errors in the present-day simulations of the CMIP5 models compared to observed data [15](WFDEI, [18] over the 1979–2013 period), and reduces the spread between the models for the different RCPs
Summary
The Sudano-Sahelian zone is one of the most vulnerable regions in the world to climate hazards It is characterized by a monsoon season stretching between May and September, which concentrates the majority of annual precipitation (between 200 and above 1200 mm per year). In this region, the rural population depends mainly on this rainfall season for subsistence rainfed farming and pastoralism [1]. The subsistence crops are mainly maize, pearl millet and sorghum. They play a very important role in West Africa and account for over 60% to 98% of total crop production for the period 2008–2017 for Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal (FAOSTAT). Climate change and the impact on agriculture could lead to a weakening of crop yield and crop production with high uncertainty for the 21st century [2,3]
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