UNS: Collaborative Research: Global Agricultural Impacts of Stratospheric Aerosol Climate Intervention

Lead PI: Dr. Jonas Jägermeyr

Unit Affiliation: Center for Climate Systems Research (CCSR)

April 2021 - September 2022
Inactive
Global
Project Type: Research

DESCRIPTION: Injection of aerosols into the stratosphere, an approach known as stratospheric aerosol climate intervention, has been suggested as a strategy to compensate for anthropogenic global warming. Much research has focused on climate changes associated with stratospheric aerosol climate intervention (also called stratospheric aerosol geoengineering – SAG), but only a few studies have addressed its potential societal impacts, in particular global agricultural productivity. This project will examine how anticipated climate changes from SAG, compared with the present and a future without SAG, would interact with the global agriculture system, influence crop growth, and impact world food production. Spatially explicit climate changes considered here associated with SAG include less total solar radiation, more diffuse solar radiation, reduced surface temperature, changed precipitation, changed surface ozone concentration, and different global mean CO2 levels.

This project is a multidisciplinary collaboration to evaluate global agriculture impacts of SAG with an integrated assessment framework, including a state-of-the-art Earth System Model linked to multiple mechanistic crop models. These models are targeted to advance the frontier of process-based crop modeling with representations of ozone damage and diffuse radiation in photosynthesis processes. Impact uncertainties will be systematically quantified through the model ensemble setup and multi-crop model assessment, and by using different downscaling methods for climate forcing data. Detailed impacts of individual climate factors on crop yields will be studied, while considering feedbacks from the agriculture system to the anticipated SAG climate impacts. The results of this project will provide new quantitative evidence of SAG implications for world food production in view of present day and potential future climates without SAG. The project will foster communication between the climate modeling community (including the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project) and the crop modeling community (the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project), to advance understanding of agricultural impacts under global warming and a future climate with stratospheric aerosol intervention.