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An Integrated Assessment of the Impacts of Changing Climate Variability on Agricultural Productivity and Profitability in an Irrigated Mediterranean Catchment

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Abstract

Climate change is likely to have a profound effect on many agricultural variables, although the extent of its influence will vary over the course of the annual farm management cycle. Consequently, the effect of different and interconnected physical, technical and economic factors must be modeled in order to estimate the effects of climate change on agricultural productivity. Such modeling commonly makes use of indicators that summarize the among environmental factors that are considered when farmers plan their activities. This study uses net evapotranspiration (ETN), estimated using EPIC, as a proxy index for the physical factors considered by farmers when managing irrigation. Recent trends suggest that the probability distribution function of ETN may continue to change in the near future due to changes in the irrigation needs of crops. Also, water availability may continue to vary due to changes in the rainfall regime. The impacts of the uncertainties related to these changes on costs are evaluated using a Discrete Stochastic Programming model representing an irrigable Mediterranean area where limited water is supplied from a reservoir. In this context, adaptation to climate change can be best supported by improvements to the collective irrigation systems, rather than by measures aimed at individual farms such as those contained within the rural development policy.

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Notes

  1. The comparison between the 2004 baseline PDFs and near future PDFs was preceded by two-tailed F tests to ensure that the weather generator WXGEN did not introduce any bias in terms of variance in the PDFs, despite the number of observed years used as input for WXGEN (10) being lower than the number used for the 2004 baseline.

  2. Note the differences among represented farms, with cultivated land and income levels of large vineyards and dairy farms being much higher than other types. In contrast, the economic size of small farms was, on average, very small. Also, CAP payments had considerable relevance for small and medium-sized farms, and in the case of olive groves, generated an appreciable value of NI + CAP reversing the negative value of NI.

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Acknowledgments

This study was carried out under the Agroscenari project (www.agroscenari.it) funded by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (Ministero delle Politiche Agricole Alimentari e Forestali).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Scienze e Tecnologie per l’Agricoltura, le Foreste, la Natura e l’Energia, Università degli Studi della Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy

    Gabriele Dono, Raffaele Cortignani & Luca Giraldo

  2. Nucleo Ricerca Desertificazione, Università degli Studi di Sassari, Sassari, Italy

    Luca Doro

  3. Nucleo Ricerca Desertificazione and Dipartimento di Agraria, Università degli studi di Sassari, Sassari, Italy

    Luigi Ledda & Pier Paolo Roggero

  4. Istituto per la Biometeorologia IBIMET - CNR, Florence, Italy

    Massimiliano Pasqui

Authors
  1. Gabriele Dono
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  2. Raffaele Cortignani
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  3. Luca Doro
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  4. Luca Giraldo
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  5. Luigi Ledda
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  6. Massimiliano Pasqui
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  7. Pier Paolo Roggero
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Correspondence to Gabriele Dono.

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Dono, G., Cortignani, R., Doro, L. et al. An Integrated Assessment of the Impacts of Changing Climate Variability on Agricultural Productivity and Profitability in an Irrigated Mediterranean Catchment. Water Resour Manage 27, 3607–3622 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-013-0367-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-013-0367-3

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