Climate adaptation and developing climate-resilient crops
Droughts, floods, and other extreme events are making farming more challenging and threatening crop yields worldwide.
Adapting to it would entail moving crops away up to thousands of miles to more favourable environments for crops growing significantly in tropical or equatorial regions where extremely high temperatures could decrease crops yields.
A study by Sultan, Defrance, and Iizumi published on the “Nature” website finds that climate change effects have already caused significant crop yield losses in West Africa. Researchers used two ensembles of 100 historical climate simulations of sorghum and millet yields for two types of climate conditions derived from an atmospheric general circulation model and crop models – one with climate change and the other without climate change from 2000 to 2009.
They find that the simulations with climate change – that is, with a warming of 1°C, will bring more frequent heat and rainfall extremes will reduce the regional average yield by 10 to 20% for millet and 5 – 15% for sorghum which is equivalent to USD 2.33 to 4.20 billion for millet, and USD 0.73 to 2.17 billion for sorghum.
According to the study, findings will serve as a basis for loss and damage due to climate change and help estimate the cost of adapting crop production systems to climate change.
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