The risk of experiencing a summer such as the one we have just been through will increase in the years to come due to climate change.
The researchers found that wheat and maize under climate change will be most affected by drought and less so by heat stress.
– By understanding whether heat or drought poses the greatest risk to the individual types of crops, farmers and plant breeders can more readily develop and select the crop varieties and management systems that are most suitable, says one of the authors of the article, Section Manager and Professor Jørgen E. Olesen from the Department of Agroecology, Aarhus University.
The researchers used an ensemble of 10 different models to calculate how much heat or drought, respectively, contributes to yield losses in winter wheat and maize.
Thereafter, the researchers used the models to predict wheat and maize yields up to 2050.
Maize in particular will be under pressure If agriculture continues to use the current varieties and current cropping systems, climate change on a whole will lead to yield losses in maize and increasing yields in wheat.
Heat stress will, on average for all of Europe, not pose a problem for crops if there is sufficient rainfall, while drought stress will pose a problem for maize, in particular.
In years with low yields, drought will be a problem for both maize and wheat and there will be no help to find from increased levels of CO2 — which would otherwise benefit yields in the absence of drought.
Journal Reference: Heidi Webber, Frank Ewert, Jørgen E. Olesen, Christoph Müller, Stefan Fronzek, Alex C. Ruane, Maryse Bourgault, Pierre Martre, Behnam Ababaei, Marco Bindi, Roberto Ferrise, Robert Finger, Nándor Fodor, Clara Gabaldón-Leal, Thomas Gaiser, Mohamed Jabloun, Kurt-Christian Kersebaum, Jon I. Lizaso, Ignacio J. Lorite, Loic Manceau, Marco Moriondo, Claas Nendel, Alfredo Rodríguez, Margarita Ruiz-Ramos, Mikhail A. Semenov, Stefan Siebert, Tommaso Stella, Pierre Stratonovitch, Giacomo Trombi, Daniel Wallach.
Diverging importance of drought stress for maize and winter wheat in Europe.

She was speaking at the inaugural session of five-day tailor made training workshop on "Gender, Water Management & Climate Adaptation" co-organized by the Centre for Public Policy Research (CPPR) at the Institute of Management Sciences (IMSciences) and International education for Water Education (IHE), Netherlands from Jan 28 to Feb 1 here.
"After few big dams we have not planned or built any such other water saving reservoir.
Such training sessions are necessary and should be held to develop adequate information and expertise over the matter," she said.
She added that Netherlands would like to support programmes related to water management and agriculture sector development.
"Netherlands will develop data base helpful in water management in various parts of the world.
"Pakistan is ranked among the most water scarce and vulnerable to climate change countries.
The training material had been developed by IHE Delft resource persons, covering key water issues in water governance including trans-boundary water issues, WASH, integrated water management, policy and institutional environment of water governance, policy and politics of climate adaptation and other key topics.
Director IMSciences, Peshawar Dr Muhammad Mohsin said that the training session was a first step towards international training and water shortage was a national problem and we would have to work on this issue.
Professor (Water Governance, IHE) Margaret Zwarteveen said that climate change and other associated global environmental issues had manifested the fact that all old knowledge, policies and mechanisms had gone outdated and insufficient to cope with the induced matter of water scarcity.
However, the training session would help built mechanisms and understanding of the water governance and management concepts in a proper way, she added.

TUCSON – Tree rings going back 800 years are giving researchers at the University of Arizona a window into how climate change could expand the planet’s most extreme deserts, including the Sonoran, which extends from the Baja Peninsula into Southern California and much of southern Arizona.
“We see a trend, atmospherically speaking, that the tropical region is moving further north in the Northern Hemisphere,” said Valerie Trouet, a dendrochronologist and associate professor at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona.
“We can determine how the edge of the tropics has moved over the last 800 years,” Trouet said.
Trouet, who co-authored a study published in October in the journal Nature Geoscience, found that the expansion of the tropics northward from 1568 to 1634 coincided with severe droughts, the collapse of Turkey’s Ottoman empire and the end of China’s Ming Dynasty.
“Our results suggest that climate change was one of the contributing factors to those societal disruptions,” said Trouet in a recent UA News article about the study.
The team’s findings are important because they could help explain how ongoing droughts could change some of the planet’s desert regions, including the Sonoran.
The Sonoran Desert lies on the edge of the tropics, where air-driven atmospheric circulation sinks.
These huge atmospheric circulations are known as Hadley cells and they are the primary driver of the tropics.
The National Weather Service describes Hadley cells as warm air rising at the equator, and sinking around 30 degrees latitude north and south.
UA researchers combined tree-ring data from five mid-latitude regions in the Northern Hemisphere.

One of its prime sources of water is the Rio Grande.
But climate change is making that increasingly difficult and is pushing the city to look for new sources of water.
Increasing temperatures will make the dry region even more vulnerable to drought, according to the federal government’s most recent national climate assessment.
The district manages the water distribution of some 90,000 acres of farmland along the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico and Texas.
Since 1958, the amount of early April snowmelt going into the Rio Grande has dropped 25% due to less snowpack and evaporation.
Drought isn’t anything new for the 1,800-mile long river.
It has a capacity of about 2 million acre feet, King said.
For those who rely on the river, like the city of El Paso, they must look for alternative water sources out of necessity.
It is something that El Paso is used to.
That’s more than 20,000 times the amount of water El Paso used this year.

One of its prime sources of water is the Rio Grande.
But climate change is making that increasingly difficult and is pushing the city to look for new sources of water.
Increasing temperatures will make the dry region even more vulnerable to drought, according to the federal government’s most recent national climate assessment.
The district manages the water distribution of some 90,000 acres of farmland along the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico and Texas.
Since 1958, the amount of early April snowmelt going into the Rio Grande has dropped 25% due to less snowpack and evaporation.
Drought isn’t anything new for the 1,800-mile long river.
It has a capacity of about 2 million acre feet, King said.
For those who rely on the river, like the city of El Paso, they must look for alternative water sources out of necessity.
It is something that El Paso is used to.
That’s more than 20,000 times the amount of water El Paso used this year.

The Himalayan region supports about 20 percent of the world’s population.
Among the 12 states in the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR), Assam is found to be the most vulnerable to the changing climate, according to a Department of Science and Technology (DST) vulnerability assessment.
The study, "Climate Vulnerability Assessment for the Indian Himalayan Region Using a Common Framework", was done by the Indian Institute of Technology-Guwahati and the Indian Institute of Technology-Mandi in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, to help understand climate change vulnerabilities which could inform development of adaptation strategies and ecosystem management for the Himalayan region.
The study was part of the Swiss-funded Indian Himalayas Climate Adaptation Programme (IHCAP).
The assessment is significant for India as a majority of its population is dependent on agriculture which requires water.
Look out for them in 2019 Measuring climate change vulnerability The study explained that states with low per capita income, the low area under irrigation, low area under forests per 1,000 households and high area under open forests will receive a high vulnerability score.
"For example, Assam has the least area under irrigation, least forest area available per 1,000 rural households and the second lowest per capita income among the other IHR states, and thus scores the highest vulnerability score," the report observed.
"The state has seven major drivers of vulnerability – highest yield variability, no area under crop insurance, largest area under open forests, and largest area under slope (more than 30 percent as compared to other states.
"Relatively high vulnerability arising out of lack of irrigation has been compensated by the fact that the yield variability of food grains is much lower in the state, leading to not so high sensitivity of agricultural production.
But, as per the study, mountainous regions are one of the most fragile environments across the world and other preliminary studies reveal that the IHR will experience higher levels of climate change and its associated impacts.

“Climate change will likely continue to alter the occurrence of record-breaking wet and dry months in the future,” the study predicts, “with severe consequences for agricultural production and food security.” Heavy rainfall events, with severe flooding, are occurring more often in the central and Eastern United States, Northern Europe and northern Asia.
The number of months with record-high rainfall increased in the central and Eastern United States by more than 25 percent between 1980 and 2013.
In 2017, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria contributed to a total of $306 billion in damage from extreme weather events in the United States.
The number of record-setting dry months increased by nearly 50 percent in sub-Saharan Africa during the study period.
Jascha Lehmann, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and lead author of the study, compared extreme weather events to a high roll of a die.
“That’s not to say models are not good,” Lehmann said in an interview, but his observational data “fits what we expect from physics and what models also show.” Climate models have long predicted that because of the greenhouse gases human activity has pumped into the atmosphere and the warming that results, the world’s wet regions are likely to grow wetter.
Regions that tend to be dry, by contrast, are expected to grow even more parched as higher temperatures dry the soil and air.
“Climate change drives both wet and dry extremes,” Lehmann said.
Given natural weather variability, some extreme weather events were to be expected, so the researchers tried to determine how many events would have occurred without the influence of global warming.
The researchers determined that one-third of the record-dry months recorded in the African regions under study would not have occurred without the influence of climate change.

by the Climate Centre at COP 24 in Katowice New research published on Monday, as the second week of UN climate talks in Poland got underway, shows “clear ties between today’s extremes and human causes” in both the developed and developing world.
The report – Explaining Extreme Events in 2017 from a Climate Perspective – is the seventh in an annual series that began in 2011.
“These attribution studies are telling us that a warming Earth is continuing to send us new and more extreme weather events every year,” said BAMS Editor Jeff Rosenfeld.
‘In a decade the research has evolved enough to address a wider scope of societal challenges’ This is the second year that scientists have identified extreme weather they say could not have happened without warming.
“Scientific evidence supports increasing confidence that human activity is driving a variety of extreme events now,” he added.
“These are having large economic impacts across the United States and around the world.” ‘Local risks’ The extreme-weather events studied in the seven issues of the report to date do not represent a comprehensive analysis of all events during that span, BAMS said.
About 70 per cent of the 146 research findings published in the series identified a substantial link between an extreme event and climate change; 30 per cent did not.
Researchers are “often going after more local risks like heatwaves, fire danger, and floods on scales of a few days, for pinpoint areas of extreme impacts,” Rosenfeld added.
“In barely a decade, the research focus has evolved enough to address a wider scope of societal challenges.” Coastal waters The research on 2017 includes findings that very warm seas off the coast of Africa that “could not have occurred in a pre-industrial climate” doubled the probability of drought in East Africa, which left more than 6 million people in Somalia facing food shortages.
Climate change made heatwaves in the European Mediterranean region at least as hot as last year’s three times more likely than in 1950, it says, while the record-breaking 2017 heat in China, once rare, is now a one-in-five-year event due to climate change.

King called the Rio Grande a harbinger of what’s to come.
The federal government projects that temperatures could rise an additional 8 degrees Fahrenheit in the region by 2100.
The reservoir there sits right on the Rio Grande and forms the largest recreational lake in the state.
It is something that El Paso is used to.
Instead of relying solely on pumped groundwater, Archuleta expanded El Paso’s water portfolio.
Farmers in the Western United States typically organized a system of rights or allotments to use water off of the river, including the Rio Grande.
Next year, El Paso expects desalination to provide 7% to 9% of its water.
Drinking treated sewage Today, El Paso is ready to take the next step in expanding its water portfolio.
Trejo says it can take about five years for the water to filter through the ground before being pumped back out and treated to the standards of clean drinking water.
Water really is all around us in every city.”

After more than a week of being holed up inside due to the toxic haze that had settled over the Bay Area, after I’d sealed my windows with blue painter’s tape, ran an air purifier in the bedroom and put on an N95 mask anytime I stepped outside, I felt trapped, with a disturbing cough deep in my chest.
I sent a desperate email to a friend who lives in Beijing with her two children: Do you have any tips for getting through this?
We had a long Skype call, in which she showed me a glimpse of her world: specialized masks with a changeable filter and silicone seals that give her and her children the look of fighter pilots.
During periods of bad outdoor air quality, they go from bubble to bubble of clean air, to other similarly outfitted apartments.
They have the routine down: Before heading out, her children know to check the monitor to see if they need their masks that day.
No different, say, than the hand-cranked radio, canned goods and gallons of water we in the Bay Area are supposed to have on hand in case of an earthquake, or the preparations people elsewhere take when preparing for a blizzard, stocking up on supplies, or a hurricane, like installing storm shutters.
These are the risks we weigh, and the safety measures we take, to remain where we are.
On the outside looking in, some may take the attitude, “I couldn’t live like that.” And yet, don’t we have to admit that our options are closing, due to climate change?
His grandmother, who has since recovered, has installed an air purifier in every room and wears her mask when the air quality worsens.
Her columns appear Fridays in Datebook.