Crop Regional Assessments.

The Agricultural Modeling Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) has established several projects in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia to address the issue of climate change at a regional scale through funding provided by the UK Agency for International Development. The overall goal of the project is to determine the potential impact of climate change on crop and livestock production and income at a farm level, and to develop adaptation scenarios that can improve the livelihoods of small-holder farmers under current and future climate conditions. This has brought together a wide range of trans-disciplinary scientists in climatology, agronomy, crop modeling, and agricultural economics. The regional teams have developed novel solutions to climate change and adaptation, including interactions with stakeholders ranging from farmers to policy makers. The core of the approach was based on two crop simulation modeling systems that include the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) and the Agricultural Production Systems sIMulator (APSIM). Both models were first evaluated with local experimental data, followed by the evaluation with on-farm data from representative farming systems for a region. The climate change scenarios were then used as input for the crop models for simulation of the same on-farm cropping systems. Different management option were evaluated, including expected changes in technology for future production as well as adaptations that can potentially be applied to offset the potential negative impact of climate change. Predicted yield and associated information was then provided as input for the Tradeoff Analysis-Minimum Data (TOA-MD) model for economic analysis. Questions that were addressed included the sensitivity of the current agricultural system to climate change, the impact of climate change on future agricultural production systems and the benefits of climate change adaptations. The outcome of these activities has resulted in short policy briefs that have been shared with stakeholders.