Climate Change Impact on Water Consumption and Water Productivity of Crops: Update on Recent Findings
A side event during Cairo Water Week 2022
Cairo Water Week, 2022
FAO-RNE hosts an interesting technical session at the Cairo Water Week focusing on climate change impact on water consumption and water productivity of crops.
Leaving apart extreme events (e.g., drought, floods, heat waves, etc.), it is expected that climate change (CC) will impact crop performance mainly through two mechanisms which would affect both ‘evapotranspiration’ (ET) and ‘productivity’ in opposite directions: increased temperatures and increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
This Technical session is organized in the context of the Regional Water scarcity Initiative and its regional project WEPS-NENA “implementing the 2030 Agenda on efficiency, productivity, and sustainability for water in the NENA region.
The projected impacts of climate change on major crop yields are now well documented, based on two decades of research. Globally, negative impacts are more commonly found than positive ones. Observations of the effects of climate trends on crop production indicate that climate change has already negatively affected wheat and maize yields in many regions, as well as globally.
A number of FAO AquaCrop simulation studies have demonstrated that the ‘CO2 fertilization effect’ can temper the detrimental effects of changed climatic factors in certain locations or improve the agricultural production in other places. For a case study in Tunis (Tunisia), simulated yield of wheat decreased for the period 2046-2065 compared to the baseline period if only the effect of climatic changes (rainfall, ETo and temperature) were considered while yield increased if also the effect of elevated CO2 was considered.
The FAO Report on the “Remote Sensing Determination of Evapotranspiration” synthesizes the results of 24 webinars and a dialogue process concluded at the CWW-2021. The webinars mainly aimed at updating and upgrading the knowledge regarding current RS ET determination, the most common and adopted algorithms and approaches and the latest advances.
Cairo Water Week 16th-19th October 2022