Abstract
Abstract. Future changes in the climate system could have significant impacts on the natural environment and human activities, which in turn affect changes in the climate system. In the interaction between natural and human systems under climate change conditions, land use is one of the elements that play an essential role. On the one hand, future climate change will affect the availability of water and food, which may impact land-use change. On the other hand, human-induced land-use change can affect the climate system through biogeophysical and biogeochemical effects. To investigate these interrelationships, we developed MIROC-INTEG-LAND (MIROC INTEGrated LAND surface model version 1), an integrated model that combines the land surface component of global climate model MIROC (Model for Interdisciplinary Research on Climate) with water resources, crop production, land ecosystem, and land-use models. The most significant feature of MIROC-INTEG-LAND is that the land surface model that describes the processes of the energy and water balance, human water management, and crop growth incorporates a land use decision-making model based on economic activities. In MIROC-INTEG-LAND, spatially detailed information regarding water resources and crop yields is reflected in the prediction of future land-use change, which cannot be considered in the conventional integrated assessment models. In this paper, we introduce the details and interconnections of the submodels of MIROC-INTEG-LAND, compare historical simulations with observations, and identify various interactions between the submodels. By evaluating the historical simulation, we have confirmed that the model reproduces the observed states well. The future simulations indicate that changes in climate have significant impacts on crop yields, land use, and irrigation water demand. The newly developed MIROC-INTEG-LAND could be combined with atmospheric and ocean models to develop an integrated earth system model to simulate the interactions among coupled natural–human earth system components.
Highlights
The problems associated with climate change are related to the various processes involved in natural and human systems, as well as their interconnections
With iESM, it is possible to capture the various interactions between the natural environment and human economic activities (Collins et al, 2015), but the model used to indicate the impact of climate change on water resources and crops is rather simplified (Thornton et al, 2017; Robinson et al, 2018; Calvin and Bond-Lamberty 2018)
The crop growth module for irrigation water is based on the H08 model (Hanasaki et al, 2008a, b), where the crop vegetation formulations and parameters are adopted from the Soil and Water Integrated Model (SWIM) (Krysanova et al, 1998)
Summary
The problems associated with climate change are related to the various processes involved in natural and human systems, as well as their interconnections. With iESM, it is possible to capture the various interactions between the natural environment and human economic activities (Collins et al, 2015), but the model used to indicate the impact of climate change on water resources and crops is rather simplified (Thornton et al, 2017; Robinson et al, 2018; Calvin and Bond-Lamberty 2018). IAMs simplify processes related to the natural environment (water resources, the ecosystem, crop growth, etc.) (Robinson et al, 2018) and do not explore the interactions between the natural and human systems on a spatially disaggregated basis (Alexander et al, 2018). A summary of the results from simulations by MIROC-INTEG-LAND of future conditions and a discussion of the interactions between climate and water resources, crops, land use, and ecosystem are presented in Sect.
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