This paper provides a comprehensive review of literature related to the assessment of climate change impacts on crop productivity using climate, water and crop yield models. The existing studies present that climate change models with higher spatial resolution can be a way forward for future climate projections. Meanwhile, stochastic projections of more than one climate model are necessary for providing insights into model uncertainties as well as to develop risk management strategies. It is projected that water availability will increase in some parts of the world, which will have its own effect on water use efficiency and water allocation. Crop production can increase if irrigated areas are expanded or irrigation is intensified, but these may increase the rate of environmental degradation. Since climate change impacts on soil water balance will lead to changes of soil evaporation and plant transpiration, consequently, the crop growth period may shorten in the future impacting on water productivity. Crop yields affected by climate change are projected to be different in various areas, in some areas crop yields will increase, and for other areas it will decrease depending on the latitude of the area and irrigation application. Existing modelling results show that an increase in precipitation will increase crop yield, and what is more, crop yield is more sensitive to the precipitation than temperature. If water availability is reduced in the future, soils of high water holding capacity will be better to reduce the impact of drought while maintaining crop yield. With the temperature increasing and precipitation fluctuations, water availability and crop production are likely to decrease in the future. If the irrigated areas are expanded, the total crop production will increase; however, food and environmental quality may degrade. 2009 National Natural Science Foundation of China and Chinese Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier Limited and Science in China Press. All rights reserved.

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Climate change impacts on crop yield, crop water productivity and food security - A review

[1] Both climate change and human activities are known to have induced changes to hydrology. Consequently, quantifying the net impact of human contribution to the streamflow change is a challenge. In this paper, a decomposition method based on the Budyko hypothesis is used to quantify the climate (i.e., precipitation and potential evaporation change) and direct human impact on mean annual streamflow (MAS) for 413 watersheds in the contiguous United States. The data for annual precipitation, runoff, and potential evaporation are obtained from the international Model Parameter Estimation Experiment (MOPEX), which is often assumed to only include gauges unaffected by human interferences. The data are split into two periods (1948–1970 and 1971–2003) to quantify the change over time. Although climate is found to affect MAS more than direct human impact, the results show that assuming the MOPEX data set to be unaffected by human activities is far from realistic. Climate change causes increasing MAS in most watersheds, while the direct human-induced change is spatially heterogeneous in the contiguous United States, with strong regional patterns, e.g., human activities causing increased MAS in the Midwest and significantly decreased MAS in the High Plains. The climate- and human-induced changes are found to be more severe in arid regions, where water is limited. Comparing the results to a collection of independent data sets indicates that the estimated direct human impacts on MAS in this largely nonurban set of watersheds might be attributed to several human activities, such as cropland expansion, irrigation, and the construction of reservoirs.

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Quantifying the relative contribution of the climate and direct human impacts on mean annual streamflow in the contiguous United States

Distinguishing the relative impacts of climate change and human activities on variation of streamflow in the Poyang Lake catchment, China

[1] Budyko's framework has been widely used to study basin-scale water and energy balances and one of the formulations of the Budyko curve is Fu's equation. The curve shape parameter ϖ in Fu's equation controls how much of the available water will be evaporated given the available energy. Previous studies have found that land surface characteristics significantly affect variations in the parameter ϖ. In this study, we focus on the vegetation impact and examine the conditions under which vegetation plays a major role in controlling the variability of ϖ. Using data from 26 major global river basins that are larger than 300,000 km2, the basin-specific ϖ parameter is found to be linearly correlated with the long-term averaged annual vegetation coverage. A simple parameterization for the ϖ parameter based solely on remotely sensed vegetation information is proposed, which improves predictions of annual actual evapotranspiration by reducing the root mean square error (RMSE) from 76 mm to 47 mm as compared to the default ϖ value used in the Budyko curve method. The controlling impact of vegetation on the basin-specific ϖ parameter is diminished in small catchments with areas less than 50,000 km2, which suggests a scale-dependence of the role of vegetation in affecting water and energy balances. In small catchments, other key ecohydrological processes need to be taken into account in order to fully capture the variability of the ϖ parameter in Fu's equation.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/wrcr.20107

Zhenmei Ma

Papers

Analysis of impacts of climate variability and human activity on streamflow for a river basin in arid region of northwest China