The impact of climate change on China's crop production: A CMIP5 ensemble assessment

Abstract

Accurate evaluation and prediction of the potential impact of climate change on crop production is essential to the sustainable development of a country's agriculture. Model variations plus uncertainties in the future climate change scenarios create a big challenge for such evaluation. In this work, we developed a statistical crop model using the historical yield data between 1981-2010 from the National Bureau of Statistics; and analyzed the impact of temperature and precipitation change on the crop yields in six different regions of China based on ensemble climate predictions from CMIP5 (the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5). Our results suggest that crop productionss per unit sown area in Eastern, Centural-South, and Southwest China were all negetively impacted by increasing temperature, while in Northwest China the yield was positively correlated with both temperature and precipitation change. The sensitivity of crop yield to climate warming tends to increase from north to south and from inner land to coast regions. Future projections with a medium greenhouse gas mitigation scenario (RCP4.5) showed that without sufficient adaptation measures the crop yield in China would experience a 3.4-8.0% reduction in 2030s. Our approach used over 20 ensemble predictions from six state-of-the-art climate models thus reduced the overall uncertainty and provided a consistant albeit conservative assessment of the climate impact.