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Projective analysis of staple food crop productivity in adaptation to future climate change in China

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Abstract

Climate change continually affects our capabilities to feed the increasing population. Rising temperatures have the potential to shorten the crop growth duration and therefore reduce crop yields. In the past decades, China has successfully improved crop cultivars to stabilize, and even lengthen, the crop growth duration to make use of increasing heat resources. However, because of the complex cropping systems in the different regions of China, the possibility and the effectiveness of regulating crop growth duration to reduce the negative impacts of future climate change remain questionable. Here, we performed a projective analysis of the staple food crop productivity in double-rice, wheat-rice, wheat-maize, single-rice, and single-maize cropping systems in China using modeling approaches. The results indicated that from the present to the 2040s, the warming climate would shorten the growth duration of the current rice, wheat, and maize cultivars by 2–24, 11–13, and 9–29 days, respectively. The most significant shortening of the crop growth duration would be in Northeast China, where single-rice and single-maize cropping dominates the croplands. The shortened crop growth duration would consequently reduce crop productivity. The most significant decreases would be 27–31, 6–20, and 7–22% for the late crop in the double-rice rotation, wheat in the winter wheat-rice rotation, and single maize, respectively. However, our projection analysis also showed that the negative effects of the warming climate could be compensated for by stabilizing the growth duration of the crops via improvement in crop cultivars. In this case, the productivity of rice, wheat, and maize in the 2040s would increase by 4–16, 31–38, and 11–12%, respectively. Our modeling results implied that the possibility of securing future food production exists by adopting proper adaptation options in China.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the atmosphere and biology sub-centers of CERN for data support. This study was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 31370492, 41605088, 41471444, and 41573069).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LAPC, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Qing Zhang, Wen Zhang, Tingting Li, Yongqiang Yu & Guocheng Wang

  2. LVEC, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Wenjuan Sun

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  1. Qing Zhang
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  2. Wen Zhang
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  3. Tingting Li
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  4. Wenjuan Sun
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Correspondence to Wen Zhang.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 7 General information for the stations selected for model parameterization
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Appendix 2

Table 8 Key calibrated parameters of Crop-C for rice, wheat, and maize
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Appendix 3

Table 9 Projected future temperature, precipitation and CO2 change under RCP4.5 for different sites in FGOALS
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Zhang, Q., Zhang, W., Li, T. et al. Projective analysis of staple food crop productivity in adaptation to future climate change in China. Int J Biometeorol 61, 1445–1460 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-017-1322-4

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