Abstract
Irrigated agriculture in snow-dependent regions contributes significantly to global food production. This study quantifies the impacts of climate change on irrigated agriculture in the snow-dependent Yakima River Basin (YRB) in the Pacific Northwest United States. Here we show that increasingly severe droughts and temperature driven reductions in growing season significantly reduces expected annual agricultural productivity. The overall reduction in mean annual productivity also dampens interannual yield variability, limiting yield-driven revenue fluctuations. Our findings show that farmers who adapt to climate change by planting improved crop varieties may potentially increase their expected mean annaul productivity in an altered climate, but remain strongly vulnerable to irrigation water shortages that substantially increase interannual yield variability (i.e., increasing revenue volatility). Our results underscore the importance for crop adaptation strategies to simultaneously capture the biophysical effects of warming as well as the institutional controls on water availability.
Highlights
Irrigated agriculture in snow-dependent regions contributes significantly to global food production
As past studies[12,27] have shown, in the Pacific Northwest, climate change does not produce a clear direction of change for precipitation, there is significant disagreement in the projections attained across the ensemble of available general circulation models (GCMs)[27,28]
There there is the potential for unprecedented droughts in the Yakima River Basin (YRB) system, which have not been recorded in the observed past
Summary
Irrigated agriculture in snow-dependent regions contributes significantly to global food production. The second mechanism where climate change impacts irrigated agriculture is the expected increase in the severity and frequency of droughts in snow-dependent areas[12,13,14]. In these basins, agriculture receives the majority of its summertime water supply from the melting of accumulated snowpacks. Higher temperatures accelerate the melting of snowpacks, further shifting water availability away from irrigation months[6,7,21,22] This can lead to curtailment (or interruption) of water rights for irrigation, producing an indirect water scarcity effect from climate change on crop yields. All of these factors potentially limit the validity of many of the simulation-based assessments that do not account for these region-specific details
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