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The impacts of increased heat stress events on wheat yield under climate change in China

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Abstract

China is the largest wheat-producing country in the world. Wheat is one of the two major staple cereals consumed in the country and about 60% of Chinese population eats the grain daily. To safeguard the production of this important crop, about 85% of wheat areas in the country are under irrigation or high rainfall conditions. However, wheat production in the future will be challenged by the increasing occurrence and magnitude of adverse and extreme weather events. In this paper, we present an analysis that combines outputs from a wide range of General Circulation Models (GCMs) with observational data to produce more detailed projections of local climate suitable for assessing the impact of increasing heat stress events on wheat yield. We run the assessment at 36 representative sites in China using the crop growth model CSM-CropSim Wheat of DSSAT 4.5. The simulations based on historical data show that this model is suitable for quantifying yield damages caused by heat stress. In comparison with the observations of baseline 1996–2005, our simulations for the future indicate that by 2100 the projected increases in heat stress would lead to an ensemble-mean yield reduction of −7.1% (with a probability of 80%) and −17.5% (with a probability of 96%) for winter wheat and spring wheat, respectively, under the irrigated condition. Although such losses can be fully compensated by CO2 fertilization effect as parameterized in DSSAT 4.5, a great caution is needed in interpreting this fertilization effect because existing crop dynamic models are unable to incorporate the effect of CO2 acclimation (the growth-enhancing effect decreases over time) and other offsetting forces.

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Notes

  1. For an informative review, see Timsina and Humphreys (2006).

  2. Some other forces may also bring in eliminating effects. For example, rising levels of atmospheric CO2 is highly likely to increase the severity of wheat diseases, thus reducing yields (Váry et al. 2015), and disease levels can become worse when the plants and pathogens have been acclimatized to the higher concentrations of CO2 beforehand. Furthermore, weeds and other undesirable plants experience CO2 fertilization as well.

  3. For daily data, herein 10-year periods are considered sufficient to generate a climatology. Longer, 20- or 30-year periods should be used to obtain monthly climatologies.

  4. They are Luancheng station in Hebei Province of North China Plain and Nanjing station in the lower reach of Yangtze River Basin.

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Acknowledgements

We thank one member of the editorial team and three reviewers for their criticism and very constructive revision suggestions. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41371110, 41671113, 41601049 and 41401661), and the China’s 12th Five-year National Science & Technology Pillar Program (Grant No. 2013BAC09B04 and 2016YFC0502702).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Meteorological Centre of China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, 100081, China

    Xuan Yang

  2. Shanghai Typhoon Institute of China Meteorological Administration, Shanghai, 200030, China

    Xuan Yang & Baode Chen

  3. Shanghai Climate Center, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Meteorology and Health, Shanghai Meteorological Service, Shanghai, 200030, China

    Zhan Tian

  4. Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Laixiang Sun

  5. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), A-2361, Laxenburg, Austria

    Laixiang Sun

  6. School of Finance & Management, SOAS, University of London, London, WC1H 0XG, UK

    Laixiang Sun

  7. Statistics Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome, Italy

    Francesco N. Tubiello

  8. Institute of Agro-Environment and Sustainable Development, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, China

    Yinlong Xu

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  1. Xuan Yang
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Correspondence to Zhan Tian or Laixiang Sun.

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Yang, X., Tian, Z., Sun, L. et al. The impacts of increased heat stress events on wheat yield under climate change in China. Climatic Change 140, 605–620 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-016-1866-z

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