Annual Report 2014: climate-smart agriculture - acting locally, informing globally

CCAFS research was widely cited by the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report which is used by decision makers worldwide to prioritize and design agricultural sector interventions aimed at mitigating and adapting to climate change. Researchers from CCAFS made important contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Fifth Assessment Report which was published in 2014. In this way CCAFS has helped decision makers worldwide to prioritize and design agricultural sector interventions aimed at Impact through policies and partnerships mitigating and adapting to climate change. Citations of papers by CGIAR and CCAFS scientists in the Fifth Assessment reports were far higher than in previous reports. CCAFS researcher Professor Andy Challinor who is based at the University of Leeds in the UK was a lead author of the chapter on ‘Food security and food production systems’ in the report on Impacts Adaptation and Vulnerability. The chapter shows that on average climate change will have an increasingly negative impact on crop yields from the 2030s onwards. The impact will be greatest in the second half of the century which will see yields fall by more than 25% in some cases relative to late-20th-century levels. At the same time harvests will become more variable because of an increase in extreme weather events. Tropical regions will be affected most severely; projections indicated that crop yields in the tropics are very likely to fall from the 2080s onwards regardless of any adaptations that might be implemented. In general climate change effects on productivity will alter land use patterns both in terms of the total area sown to crops and the geographic distribution of crops.

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