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Journal Article

Exploring uncertainties in global crop yield projections in a large ensemble of crop models and CMIP5 and CMIP6 climate scenarios

Authors
/persons/resource/Christoph.Mueller

Müller,  Christoph
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research;

Franke,  James
External Organizations;

/persons/resource/jonasjae

Jägermeyr,  Jonas
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research;

Ruane,  Alex C.
External Organizations;

Elliott,  Joshua
External Organizations;

Moyer,  Elisabeth
External Organizations;

/persons/resource/Jens.Heinke

Heinke,  Jens
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research;

Falloon,  Peter
External Organizations;

Folberth,  Christian
External Organizations;

Francois,  Louis
External Organizations;

Hank,  Tobias
External Organizations;

Izaurralde,  R. César
External Organizations;

Jacquemin,  Ingrid
External Organizations;

Liu,  Wenfeng
External Organizations;

Olin,  Stefan
External Organizations;

Pugh,  Thomas
External Organizations;

Williams,  Karina E.
External Organizations;

Zabel,  Florian
External Organizations;

External Ressource
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Fulltext (public)

25050oa.pdf
(Publisher version), 4MB

Supplementary Material (public)
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Citation

Müller, C., Franke, J., Jägermeyr, J., Ruane, A. C., Elliott, J., Moyer, E., Heinke, J., Falloon, P., Folberth, C., Francois, L., Hank, T., Izaurralde, R. C., Jacquemin, I., Liu, W., Olin, S., Pugh, T., Williams, K. E., Zabel, F. (2021): Exploring uncertainties in global crop yield projections in a large ensemble of crop models and CMIP5 and CMIP6 climate scenarios. - Environmental Research Letters, 16, 3, 034040.
https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/abd8fc


Cite as: https://publications.pik-potsdam.de/pubman/item/item_25050
Abstract
Concerns over climate change are motivated in large part because of their impact on human society. Assessing the effect of that uncertainty on specific potential impacts is demanding, since it requires a systematic survey over both climate and impacts models. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of uncertainty in projected crop yields for maize, spring and winter wheat, rice, and soybean, using a suite of 9 crop models and up to 45 CMIP5 and 34 CMIP6 climate projections for three different forcing scenarios. To make this task computationally tractable, we use a new set of statistical crop model emulators. We find that climate and crop models contribute about equally to overall uncertainty. While the ranges of yield uncertainties under CMIP5 and CMIP6 projections are similar, median impact in aggregate total caloric production is typically more negative for the CMIP6 projections (+1 to -19%) than for CMIP5 (+5 to -13%). In the first half of the 21st century and for individual crops is the spread across crop models typically wider than that across climate models, but we find distinct differences between crops: globally, wheat and maize uncertainties are dominated by the crop models, but soybean and rice are more sensitive to the climate projections. Climate models with very similar global mean warming can lead to very different aggregate impacts so that climate model uncertainties remain a significant contributor to agricultural impacts uncertainty. These results show the utility of large-ensemble methods that allow comprehensively evaluating factors affecting crop yields or other impacts under climate change. The crop model ensemble used here is unbalanced and pulls the assumption that all projections are equally plausible into question. Better methods for consistent model testing, also at the level of individual processes, will have to be developed and applied by the crop modeling community.