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Adapting agricultural land management to climate change: a regional multi-objective optimization approach

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Abstract

In several regions of the world, climate change is expected to have severe impacts on agricultural systems. Changes in land management are one way to adapt to future climatic conditions, including land-use changes and local adjustments of agricultural practices. In previous studies, options for adaptation have mostly been explored by testing alternative scenarios. Systematic explorations of land management possibilities using optimization approaches were so far mainly restricted to studies of land and resource management under constant climatic conditions. In this study, we bridge this gap and exploit the benefits of multi-objective regional optimization for identifying optimum land management adaptations to climate change. We design a multi-objective optimization routine that integrates a generic crop model and considers two climate scenarios for 2050 in a meso-scale catchment on the Swiss Central Plateau with already limited water resources. The results indicate that adaptation will be necessary in the study area to cope with a decrease in productivity by 0–10 %, an increase in soil loss by 25–35 %, and an increase in N-leaching by 30–45 %. Adaptation options identified here exhibit conflicts between productivity and environmental goals, but compromises are possible. Necessary management changes include (i) adjustments of crop shares, i.e. increasing the proportion of early harvested winter cereals at the expense of irrigated spring crops, (ii) widespread use of reduced tillage, (iii) allocation of irrigated areas to soils with low water-retention capacity at lower elevations, and (iv) conversion of some pre-alpine grasslands to croplands.

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Acknowledgments

This work is part of the AGWAM project (No. 406140_125957/1) financed by the Swiss National Foundation in the framework of the National Research Program 61.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Agroscope Research Station Reckenholz-Tänikon ART, Air Pollution and Climate Group, Reckenholzstrasse 191, 8046, Zürich, Switzerland

    Tommy Klein, Annelie Holzkämper, Pierluigi Calanca & Jürg Fuhrer

  2. Oeschger Center for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Tommy Klein, Annelie Holzkämper, Pierluigi Calanca & Jürg Fuhrer

  3. The Climate Corporation, 201 Third Street, Suite 1100, San Francisco, CA, 94103, USA

    Tommy Klein

  4. Department of Computational Landscape Ecology, UFZ – Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Permoserstrasse 15, 04318, Leipzig, Germany

    Ralf Seppelt

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Klein, T., Holzkämper, A., Calanca, P. et al. Adapting agricultural land management to climate change: a regional multi-objective optimization approach. Landscape Ecol 28, 2029–2047 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-013-9939-0

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