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Increase in grain production potential of China under climate change

Liang, Zhuoran; Sun, Laixiang; Tian, Zhan; Fischer, Günther; Yan, Huimin

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Authors

Zhuoran Liang

Zhan Tian

Günther Fischer

Huimin Yan



Abstract

The rapid growth of China’s demand for grains is expected to continue in the coming decades, largely as a result of the increasing feed demand to produce protein-rich food. This leads to a great concern on future supply potentials of Chinese agriculture under climate change and the extent of China’s dependence on world food markets. While the existing literature in both agronomy and climate economics indicates a dominance of the adverse impacts of climate change on rice, wheat, and maize yields, there is a lack of study to assess changes in multi-cropping opportunities induced by climate change. Multi-cropping benefits crop production by harvesting more than once per year from a given plot. To address this important gap, we established a procedure within the Agro-ecological Zones (AEZ) modeling framework to assess future spatial shifts of multi-cropping conditions. The assessment was based on an ensemble of five General Circulation Models under four Representative Concentration Pathway scenarios in the Phase Five of Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project and accounted for the water scarcity constraints. The results show significant northward extensions of single-, double- and triple-cropping zones in the future which would provide good opportunities for crop-rotation based adaptation. The increasing multi-cropping opportunities would be able to boost the annual grain production potential by an average scale of 89(±49) Mt at the current irrigation efficiency and 143(±46) Mt at the modernized irrigation efficiency with improvement between the baseline (1981-2010) and the mid-21st century (2041-2070).

Citation

Liang, Z., Sun, L., Tian, Z., Fischer, G., & Yan, H. (2023). Increase in grain production potential of China under climate change. PNAS Nexus, 2(3), Article pgad057. https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad057

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Feb 14, 2023
Online Publication Date Mar 14, 2023
Publication Date Mar 14, 2023
Deposit Date Mar 28, 2023
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2023
Journal PNAS Nexus
Electronic ISSN 2752-6542
Publisher Oxford University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 2
Issue 3
Article Number pgad057
DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad057
Keywords climate change adaption, food security, multiple cropping, supply potentials, China
Publisher URL https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/3/pgad057/7076787

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