Increase in grain production potential of China under climate change

The rapid growth of China's demand for grains is expected to continue in the coming decades, largely as a result of the increasing feed demand to produce protein-rich food. This leads to a great concern on future supply potentials of Chinese agriculture under climate change and the extent of China's dependence on world food markets. While the existing literature in both agronomy and climate economics indicates a dominance of the adverse impacts of climate change on rice, wheat, and maize yields, there is a lack of study to assess changes in multi-cropping opportunities induced by climate change. Multi-cropping benefits crop production by harvesting more than once per year from a given plot. To address this important gap, we established a procedure within the agro-ecological zones (AEZ) modeling framework to assess future spatial shifts of multi-cropping conditions. The assessment was based on an ensemble of five general circulation models under four representative concentration pathway scenarios in the phase five of coupled model inter-comparison project and accounted for the water scarcity constraints. The results show significant northward extensions of single-, double-, and triple-cropping zones in the future which would provide good opportunities for crop-rotation-based adaptation. The increasing multi-cropping opportunities would be able to boost the annual grain production potential by an average scale of 89(+/- 49) Mt at the current irrigation efficiency and 143(+/- 46) Mt at the modernized irrigation efficiency with improvement between the baseline (1981-2010) and the mid-21st century (2041-2070).

Automated summary

China's demand for grains is growing rapidly and is expected to continue increasing in the coming decades. While climate change has adverse impacts on rice, wheat, and maize yields, there has been a lack of study on changes in multi-cropping opportunities. However, the future shows significant expansions of multi-cropping zones, which can provide opportunities for adapting to climate change and boosting grain production.