Title
Climate change impact on global potato production
Date Issued
01 October 2018
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Publisher(s)
Elsevier B.V.
Abstract
Potato is the most important non-grain crop in the world. Therefore, understanding the potential impacts of climate change on potato production is critical for future global food security. The SUBSTOR-Potato model was recently evaluated across a wide range of growing conditions, and improvements were made to better simulate atmospheric CO2 and high temperature responses. Comparisons of the improved model with field experiments, including elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations and high temperature environments, showed a RRMSE of 26% for tuber dry matter. When using the improved model across 0.5 × 0.5° grid cells over all potato-growing regions in the world, the simulated aggregated country tuber dry yields reproduced nationally-reported potato yields with a RRMSE of 56%. Applying future climate change scenarios to current potato cropping systems indicated small global tuber yield reductions by 2055 (−2% to −6%), but larger declines by 2085 (−2% to −26%), depending on the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP). The largest negative impacts on global tuber yields were projected for RCP 8.5 toward the end of the century. The simulated impacts varied depending on the region, with high tuber reductions in the high latitudes (e.g., Eastern Europe and northern America) and the lowlands of Africa, but less so in the mid-latitudes and tropical highland. Uncertainty due to different climate models was similar to seasonal variability by mid-century, but became larger than year-to-year variability by the end of the century for RCP 8.5.
Start page
87
End page
98
Volume
100
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Agronomía
Investigación climática
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85035215005
Source
European Journal of Agronomy
ISSN of the container
11610301
Sponsor(s)
Funding support for the global modeling aspects of this research was provided by the Global Futures and Strategic Foresight project of the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM). We thank the International Research Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the USAID Linkage Fund project “Collaboration between the International Potato Center (CIP) and the University of Florida (UF) to better understand and prioritize climate change adaptation needs for food security in the Andes”. We thank Patrick Ray for assisting with global climate data.
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus