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Adaptation options under climate change for multifunctional agriculture: a simulation study for western Switzerland

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Abstract

Besides its primary role in producing food and fiber, agriculture also has relevant effects on several other functions, such as management of renewable natural resources. Climate change (CC) may lead to new trade-offs between agricultural functions or aggravate existing ones, but suitable agricultural management may maintain or even improve the ability of agroecosystems to supply these functions. Hence, it is necessary to identify relevant drivers (e.g., cropping practices, local conditions) and their interactions, and how they affect agricultural functions in a changing climate. The goal of this study was to use a modeling framework to analyze the sensitivity of indicators of three important agricultural functions, namely crop yield (food and fiber production function), soil erosion (soil conservation function), and nutrient leaching (clean water provision function), to a wide range of agricultural practices for current and future climate conditions. In a two-step approach, cropping practices that explain high proportions of variance of the different indicators were first identified by an analysis of variance-based sensitivity analysis. Then, most suitable combinations of practices to achieve best performance with respect to each indicator were extracted, and trade-offs were analyzed. The procedure was applied to a region in western Switzerland, considering two different soil types to test the importance of local environmental constraints. Results show that the sensitivity of crop yield and soil erosion due to management is high, while nutrient leaching mostly depends on soil type. We found that the influence of most agricultural practices does not change significantly with CC; only irrigation becomes more relevant as a consequence of decreasing summer rainfall. Trade-offs were identified when focusing on best performances of each indicator separately, and these were amplified under CC. For adaptation to CC in the selected study region, conservation soil management and the use of cropped grasslands appear to be the most suitable options to avoid trade-offs.

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Acknowlegments

This study was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation in framework of the National Research Program NRP61. We would like to thank MeteoSwiss for providing weather data. The ENSEMBLES data used in this work were funded by the EU FP6 Integrated Project ENSEMBLES (Contract number 505539) whose support is gratefully acknowledged. We are thankful to Raphael Charles who kindly double-checked the reliability of the generated crop rotations.

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  1. Air Pollution/Climate Group, Agroscope Research Station ART, Reckenholzstrasse 191, 8046, Zurich, Switzerland

    Tommy Klein, Annelie Holzkämper, Pierluigi Calanca & Jürg Fuhrer

  2. Oeschger Center for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Tommy Klein, Annelie Holzkämper, Pierluigi Calanca & Jürg Fuhrer

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Table 2 Changes in seasonal precipitation (%), daily precipitation intensity index (%), and temperature (°C) for two climate scenarios for 2050 (ETH-CLM and SMHIRCA-HadCM3Q3), relative to the baseline (1980–2009), for the A1B emission scenario (CH2011 2011); the daily precipitation intensity index is defined as the sum of daily precipitation amounts for wet days (>1 mm) divided by the number of wet days
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Table 3 Overview of the experimental design
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Table 4 List of the 50 crop rotations generated
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Table 5 Proportion of variance explained (main effects and interactions) by different agricultural practices on sandy loam soil
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Table 6 Proportion of variance explained (main effects and interactions) by different agricultural practices on loamy soil
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Klein, T., Holzkämper, A., Calanca, P. et al. Adaptation options under climate change for multifunctional agriculture: a simulation study for western Switzerland. Reg Environ Change 14, 167–184 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-013-0470-2

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