Climate extremes and ozone pollution: a growing threat to china’s food security
Name
Ecosystem Health Sustain - 2016 - Tian - Climate extremes and ozone pollution a growing threat to China s food security.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
863.7 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d493d49f31864cb62602e327468e0a04
Author(s)
Tian, Hanqin
Ren, Wei
Tao, Bo
Sun, Ge
Chappelka, Art
Wang, Xiaoke
Pan, Shufen
Yang, Jia
Liu, Jiyuan
S. felzer, Ben
Date Issued
January 2016
Journal
Ecosystem Health and Sustainability
Publisher
Wiley
Citation
Tian H., W. Ren, B. Tao, G. Sun, A. Chappelka, X.Wang, S. Pan, J. Yang, J. Liu, B. Felzer, J. Melillo, and J. Reilly. 2016 Climate extremes and ozone pollution: a growing threat to China's food security Ecosystem Health and Sustainability 2(1):e01203.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Ensuring global food security requires a sound understanding of climate and environmental controls on crop productivity. The majority of existing assessments have focused on physical climate variables (i.e., mean temperature and precipitation), but less on the increasing climate extremes (e.g., drought) and their interactions with increasing levels of tropospheric ozone (O3). Here we quantify the combined impacts of drought and O3 on China's crop yield using a comprehensive, process-based agricultural ecosystem model in conjunction with observational data. Our results indicate that climate change/variability and O3 together led to an annual mean reduction of crop yield by 10.0% or 55 million tons per year at the national level during 1981–2010. Crop yield shows a growing threat from severe episodic droughts and increasing O3 concentrations since 2000, with the largest crop yield losses occurring in northern China, causing serious concerns in food supply security in China. Our results imply that reducing tropospheric O3 levels is critical for securing crop production in coping with increasing frequency and severity of extreme climate events such as droughts. Improving air quality should be a core component of climate adaptation strategies.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Joint Program on the Science & Policy of Global Change
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1002/ehs2.1203
