Agriculture

Globally, agriculture uses more freshwater than any other sector. Global warming affects our ability to grow food because of the way it pushes drought, rainfall, and temperature patterns towards extremes outside the narrow range of conditions that common staple crops like maize, rice, wheat, and soy are used to.

Crop Failure

In this analysis, crop yields are projected by an ensemble of global gridded crop models driven by CMIP5 climate models under scenario RCP8.5 called AgMIP (Rosenzweig et al., 2013). Changes in crop yields are affected by climate, water, nutrients, and atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Through selecting different models for an ensemble, several combinations of scenarios can be created: with or without CO2 fertilization effects, potential or nitrogen-limited yields, full or no irrigation.

For more information, see our publication Caparas et al. (2021).