Crop Physiology, Modelling and Climate Change: Impact and Adaptation Strategies

This chapter focuses on crop models, which consider the various aspects of climate change as drivers and capture the main crop physiological functions and other bio-physical aspects of crop-soil-atmosphere systems to address production and natural resource management issues at a paddock level. Physiology-based crop simulation models have been a key tool in extrapolating the impact of climate change from limited climate change-related field and controlled experiments to other climatic zones, soils, management regimes, crops, and climate change scenarios. The impact of the individual climate change components and the combined effect of climate change scenarios on crop production and externalities are explored in the chapter with such models. To counteract negative impacts of climate change and to capture some of the new opportunities of these changes, management options are investigated. Breeding options have received much less attention. While these models are a simplification of the reality, they allow a first assessment of the complexity of climate change impact and adaptation options in agriculture.