About

Climate change will influence arable crop production across Europe in the coming decades and air pollution is already having substantial impacts on crop productivity causing yield losses of between 10 and 15% on average across Europe for sensitive staple crops such as wheat.  What is unclear is how these stresses will combine to impact crop growth, development and yield through influences on important crop resource use efficiencies such as radiation, water and nutrient use.

SUSCAP aims to develop a new generation of process based crop models to better understand the mechanisms and hence impacts of these multiple stresses both for the current day and future 2050 climates. The objective is to identify the magnitude; frequency and geographical distribution of the combined stresses most likely to limit resource use efficiency and hence crop productivity. Poor air quality in Europe is currently set to continue to substantially affect crop yields until at least 2050 and GHG emissions are still on course to see large changes in climate over the coming decades.

Results

• Effectiveness, feasibility and awareness of different crop adaptation options to climate and air pollution vary across Europe with implications for food security. 
• Remote sensing data shows that crop models can provide reliable estimates of crop growth development under climate change and air pollution regimes in Europe. 
• Crop experiments and modelling show that wheat growth and yield will be impacted by both climate change and air pollution which will in turn determine the effectiveness of existing adaptation options. 
• Bias adjusted European scale modelling identifies the likely changes in climate and pollution that will impact European agriculture by 2050.