Agriculture and Climate Change: Assessing the impact of changing growing conditions.

Under the projected changes in climate, the long-term sustainability of agricultural production systems and associated livelihoods is unattainable without the development of adequate adaptation strategies. Robust and quantitative assessment tools that estimate climate change risks and vulnerabilities are crucial to decision-makers in the context of assessing trade-offs, synergies and priorities for resource allocation in the challenge of tackling climate change impacts on agriculture. In order to assist the European Commission in the implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy and associated decision making processes such as market interventions, the JRC has been operationally producing, for the past twenty years, in-season crop yield forecasts at a European level using a crop modelling infrastructure driven by agro-meteorological data and assisted by remotely sensed observations. Recently, a new modelling platform, BioMA (Biophysical Models Application), has been developed to increase the modelling capacities and extend the JRC crop monitoring expertise to analyse climate change impacts on agricultural productivity under future emission scenarios. Because crop growth models are very sensitive to input meteorological data, work involving statistical corrections and stochastic weather generation is necessary and a pre-requisite to adapt the simulated climate from emission scenarios to the requirements of crop models. Comparing simulations based on different initial conditions, parameterizations, or forcing drivers allows for the assessment of the potential impact of increased stress, such as water-limitation, diseases, or abiotic stress, on crop yield and for the exploration of adaptation strategies to minimize these effects. In the framework of different projects working on impact studies, the BioMA platform is being deployed over different agricultural landscapes such as Europe, Latin America, and West Africa to simulate impacts for a variety of crops such as: wheat, maize, rice, grapevine, soybean, millet and cotton. Short-to medium-term horizons (2020, 2030 and 2050) are targeted, based on emission scenarios proposed by the IPCC.JRC.H.4-Monitoring Agricultural Resource