South India projected to be susceptible to high future groundnut failure rates for future climate change and geo-engineered scenarios

Huiyi Yang; Steven Dobbie; Julian Ramirez-Villegas; Bing Chen; Shaojun Qiu; Sat Ghosh; Andy Challinor

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.141240

South India projected to be susceptible to high future groundnut failure rates for future climate change and geo-engineered scenarios

Sci Total Environ. 2020 Dec 10:747:141240. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.141240. Epub 2020 Jul 25.

Authors

Huiyi Yang¹, Steven Dobbie², Julian Ramirez-Villegas³, Bing Chen⁴, Shaojun Qiu⁵, Sat Ghosh⁶, Andy Challinor⁷

Affiliations

¹ Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich, ME4 4TP, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; ICAS, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Electronic address: h.yang@greenwich.ac.uk.
² ICAS, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Electronic address: s.dobbie@see.leeds.ac.uk.
³ ICAS, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; International Center for Tropical Agriculture, Cali, Colombia; CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, c/o CIAT, Cali, Colombia.
⁴ Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Environment and processes in the Boundary Layer over the Low-latitude Plateau Region, Department of atmospheric science, Yunnan University, Kunming 650091, China.
⁵ Institute of agricultural resources and regional planning, Chinese Academy of Agriculture Science, Beijing, China.
⁶ Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, Tamil Nadu 632 014, India.
⁷ ICAS, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

PMID: 32791409
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.141240

Abstract

With an increase in global mean temperature predicted for this century accompanied by more frequent extremes, will farming communities need to brace for increased crop failures and hardship? Solar dimming climate geoengineering has been proposed as a possible solution to combat rising global temperature but what effect will it or other climate related adaptation have on crop failures? We performed a crop modelling study using future climate and geoengineering projections to investigate these questions. Our results indicate that groundnut crop failure rates in Southern India are very sensitive to climate change, and project an increase of approximately a factor of two on average over this century, affecting one out of every two to three years instead of one in every five years. We also project that solar dimming geoengineering will have little impact on reducing these failure rates. In contrast, the projections for the rest of Indian regions show decreasing failure rates of 20-30%. In this research, we indicate why south India is more susceptible than the rest of the country and show that neither Solar dimming geoengineering nor reducing heat or water stress are able to fully counteract the increase in failure rates for this region. Thus our modelling projections indicate the potential for a grountnut crop failure crisis for the South India.

Keywords: Crop failure; Crop model; Extreme weather; GLAM; Geoengineering; Groundnut.