Modelling Climate Change Impacts on Agricultural Systems

Climate change is a key threat to agriculture. Modelling is fundamental to assessing its potential impacts. This collection summarises the wealth of research on improving climate impact models and their use in assessing impacts on different regions.

Modelling climate change impacts on agricultural systems reviews research on developing models in areas such as improving data flows, incorporating genetic information and dealing with uncertainty. This collection also reviews what we know about potential climate change impacts on regional agricultural systems such as, Europe, North America, Latin America, Australia and Oceania, as well as different regions in Asia and Africa.

Dr Claas Nendel heads the Research Group on Landscape Modelling at the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), Germany. He is also Professor of Landscape Systems Analysis at the University of Potsdam. Dr Nendel is the Past President of the European Society of Agronomy and hosted, among other events, the first International Crop Modelling Symposium in Berlin in 2016. He is principal developer of the MONICA model which simulates biophysical processes in agroecosystems to allow assessment of regional impacts of climate change, and is internationally known for his contribution to agroecosystem modelling.

Dr Jacques-Eric Bergez is a Systemic Agronomist and Modeller at INRAE, France and Coordinator of the H2020 project ClienFarms on climate neutral farming. Dr Bergez has held previous positions as Head of the Agroecology, Innovations & Territories Unit (AGIR) and Scientific Leader of RECORD within INRAE. Dr Bergez has authored over 70 research papers.

Dr Matthias Kuhnert is an Advanced Research Fellow in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Aberdeen, UK. He is a leading expert in environmental modelling, particularly measuring, reporting and verification (MRV) systems for tracking changes in soil organic carbon in agricultural production. He has published widely in this area and ways of measuring and modelling greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from farming. Dr Kuhnert was previously a Research Fellow at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany. He is participating in a range of research projects such as the EU-funded CIRCASA Project.

Dr Jørgen E. Olesen is Professor in Climate Change and Agriculture and Head of the Department of Agroecology at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is also an Adjunct Professor at both China Agricultural University, China and Ganzu Agricultural University, China. He is internationally recognised for his research on the effects of agriculture on the environment and how environmental change affects agroecosystems.

Dr. Bruno Basso is an agro-ecosystem scientist and University Foundation Professor in Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and W.K. Kellogg Biological Station at Michigan State University. He is a Fellow of the Soil Science Society of America and the American Society of Agronomy, and 2016 recipient of the Innovation of the year award and 2019 Outstanding Faculty Award at Michigan State University and the recipient of the 2021 Morgan Stanley Sustainable Solutions Prize. He is ranked as top 2% scientist across all disciplines and 0.006% in the field of Agronomy, Agriculture, Meteorology. He received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University.