Abstract
The effect of climate change on agriculture in the UK is here assessed using a comprehensive series of policy-relevant agro-climate indicators characterising changes to climate resources and hazards affecting productivity and operations. This paper presents projections of these indicators across the UK with gridded observed data and UKCP18 climate projections representing a range of greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. The projections can be used to inform climate change mitigation and adaptation policy. There will be substantial changes in the climate resource and hazard across the UK during the twenty-first century if emissions continue to follow a high trajectory, and there will still be some changes if emissions reduce to achieve international climate policy targets. Growing seasons for certain crops will lengthen, crop growth will be accelerated, and both drought and heat risks (for some types of production) will increase. Soils will become drier in autumn, although there will be less change in winter and spring. The longer growing seasons and warmer temperatures provide opportunities for new crops, subject to the effects of increasing challenges to production. Most of the changes are relatively consistent across the UK, although drought risk and heat stress risk increase most rapidly in the south and east. The climate change trend is superimposed onto considerable year to year variability. Although there is strong consensus across climate projections on the direction of change, there is considerable uncertainty in the rate and magnitude of change for a given emissions scenario. For the temperature-based indicators, this reflects uncertainty in climate sensitivity, whilst for the precipitation-based indicators largely reflects uncertainty in projected changes in the weather systems affecting the UK.
Highlights
In August 2020, the Times newspaper published a news article entitled ‘Climate forces farms to start growing soya’
A wet winter and dry summer had led to ‘the worst wheat harvest in decades’, but some farmers had begun growing soya, a crop which needs higher temperatures than typically expected in the UK. This encapsulates the potential effect of climate change on agriculture in the UK: changes in the potential for crop and livestock production, but changes too in the likelihood of challenging weather events affecting both operations and crop growth
This paper presents a series of agro-climatic indicators which characterise the potential effects of climate change on agriculture in the UK
Summary
In August 2020, the Times newspaper published a news article entitled ‘Climate forces farms to start growing soya’. The indicators are taken from the literature (Knox et al 2010; Rivington et al 2013; Harding et al 2015; Parsons et al 2019; Bachmair et al 2018; Dunn et al 2014; Jones et al 2020), are relevant to stakeholders (e.g. Matthews et al 2008), and are directly linked to weather impacts They cover changes to the climate resource, climate hazard, and agricultural operations, for both food and forage crops and livestock. Other national-scale studies have looked at specific crops (including wheat (Semenov 2009; Cho et al 2012; Harkness et al 2020), grassland (Qi et al 2018), barley (Yawson et al 2016), and potatoes (Daccache et al 2012)) or livestock systems (Dunn et al 2014; Fodor et al 2018) Taken together, these studies project an increase in growing season length and growing degree days, an increase in potential productivity for wheat, barley, and for grassland—primarily due to an increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations—but increasing effects of summer drought on wheat and potato (and by implication other seasonal vegetables) and increasing heat stress for livestock
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