Tailoring climate projections to the needs of agricultural stakeholders - insights from ADAPTER

Abstract:

Agriculture is among the sectors that are most vulnerable to extreme weather conditions and climate change. In Germany, the dry summers 2018 and 2019 have brought this fact into the focus of public attention. However, agricultural stakeholders are facing large scientific uncertainties and are missing actionable knowledge because existing scientific knowledge is often not tailored to the practitioners' needs and context.

The project ADAPTER (Innovative simulation-based products for weather- and climate-resilient agriculture - short: "Adapt terrestrial systems"), tackles this problem by establishing a close dialogue between scientists and agricultural chambers, farmers, plant breeding companies and policy-makers, and by co-designing new services and user-driven products. The project focuses on the weather-related time scale of days, providing site-specific high-resolution predictions in combination with specific observations, and on the climate-related time scale by extracting user-tailored information from ensembles of regional climate projections.

In this contribution, we give a current overview of our stakeholders' requirements regarding information about climate change over the next decades, focused on their variables of interest, spatio-temporal processing, and communication of uncertainties. We present results and products from observations and from the EURO-CORDEX ensemble of climate projections that are tailored to these requirements and discuss the specific benefits and novel insights from such an analysis.

A crucial step in our collaboration is the construction of adequate climate indices, for instance capturing problematic fluctuations in temperature during decisive phenological development states of a crop, or the trafficability of soils in times of seeding, tillage or fertilisation. The realisation of optimal weather conditions for crop development in a certain stage, however, does not only shift in time but also in space. Information on these shifts allows plant breeders to identify representative test sites for the breeding of crops that are adapted to future climate in the regions.

We also discuss first implications of our findings for different adaptation strategies, such as alterring crop rotations, irrigation or plant breeding. We finally present a new interactive and public product platform and discuss its potential for the stakeholder dialogue.