Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

About: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research is a facility organization based out in Potsdam, Germany. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Climate change & Global warming. The organization has 1519 authors who have published 5098 publications receiving 367023 citations.

The PRIMAP-hist national historical emissions time series

Abstract: . To assess the history of greenhouse gas emissions and individual countries' contributions to emissions and climate change, detailed historical data are needed. We combine several published datasets to create a comprehensive set of emissions pathways for each country and Kyoto gas, covering the years 1850 to 2014 with yearly values, for all UNFCCC member states and most non-UNFCCC territories. The sectoral resolution is that of the main IPCC 1996 categories. Additional time series of CO2 are available for energy and industry subsectors. Country-resolved data are combined from different sources and supplemented using year-to-year growth rates from regionally resolved sources and numerical extrapolations to complete the dataset. Regional deforestation emissions are downscaled to country level using estimates of the deforested area obtained from potential vegetation and simulations of agricultural land. In this paper, we discuss the data sources and methods used and present the resulting dataset, including its limitations and uncertainties. The dataset is available from doi:10.5880/PIK.2016.003 and can be viewed on the website accompanying this paper ( http://www.pik-potsdam.de/primap-live/primap-hist/ ).

Global potential to increase crop production through water management in rainfed agriculture

Abstract: This modeling study explores—spatially explicitly, for current and projected future climate, and for different management intensity levels—the potential for increasing global crop production through on-farm water management strategies: (a) reducing soil evaporation (‘vapor shift’) and (b) collecting runoff on cropland and using it during dry spells (‘runoff harvesting’). A moderate scenario, implying both a 25% reduction in evaporation and a 25% collection of runoff, suggests that global crop production can be increased by 19%, which is comparable with the effect of current irrigation (17%). Climate change alone (three climate models, SRES A2r emissions and population, constant land use) will reduce global crop production by 9% by 2050, which could be buffered by a vapor shift level of 50% or a water harvesting level of 25%. Even if realization of the beneficial effects of rising atmospheric CO2 concentration upon plants was ensured (by fertilizer use) in tandem with the above moderate water management scenario, the water available on current cropland will not meet the requirements of a world population of 9–10 billion.