Stanford research shows importance of European farmers adapting to climate change

Laura Seaman at Stanford News: A new Stanford study finds that due to an average 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming expected by 2040, yields of wheat and barley across Europe will drop more than 20 percent.  New Stanford research reveals that farmers in Europe will see crop yields affected as global temperatures rise, but that adaptation can help slow the decline for some crops.

For corn, the anticipated loss is roughly 10 percent, the research shows. Farmers of these crops have already seen yield growth slow down since 1980 as temperatures have risen, though other policy and economic factors have also played a role.

"The results clearly showed that modest amounts of climate change can have a big impact on yields of several crops in Europe," said Stanford doctoral student Frances Moore, who conducted the research with David Lobell, an associate professor of environmental Earth system science.

..."By adaptation, we mean a range of options based on existing technologies, such as switching varieties of a crop, installing irrigation or growing a different crop, one better suited to warmer temperatures," said Lobell, the associate director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford. "These things have been talked about for a long time, but the novelty of this study was using past data to quantify the actual potential of adaptation to reduce climate change impacts. We find that in some cases adaptation could substantially reduce impacts, but in other cases the potential may be very limited with current technologies."

According to the analysis, corn has the highest adaptation potential. Moore and Lobell predict that corn farmers can reduce yield losses by as much as 87 percent through long-term adaptation. ...

A cornfield near Straelen, Germany, shot by flamenc, Wikimedia Commons,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license