Aspects of climate change prediction relevant to crop productivity

Abstract

Projected changes in surface climate are reviewed at a range of temporal scales, with an emphasis on tropical northern Africa—a region considered to be particularly vulnerable to climate change. Noting the key aspects of ‘weather’ affecting crop yield, we then consider relevant and projected change using output from a range of state of the art global climate models (GCMs), and for different future emission scenarios. The outputs from the models reveal significant inter-model variation in the change expected by the end of the twenty-first century for even the lowest IPCC emission scenario. We provide a set of recommendations on future model diagnostics, configurations and ease of use to close further the gap between GCMs and smaller-scale crop models. This has the potential to empower countries to make their own assessments of vulnerability to climate change induced periods of food scarcity.