Abstract
Climate change poses severe threats towards global agricultural land, ultimately hindering the achievement of food security. This is particularly acute precise for inhabited oceanic islands where various intrinsic constraints challenge self-sufficiency of food. In the Galapagos Islands this is stressed out by a combination of unclear regional future climate conditions as well as a combination of diverse conservation, tourism, and development agendas. This chapter uses information derived from Global Circulation Models (GCMs) to understand the context of potential impacts on agricultural land systems in the Galapagos and hypothesize possible adaptation measures. Our results show a consistent signal across the used GCMs to project a future increase in precipitation and temperature in the islands. Therefore, our estimations project an increase in temperature that range from 0.7 °C in the 2020s up to 3.1 °C, for the most extreme scenario, in the 2070s. While increases in precipitation are less consistent results, our results typically show a future increase of 25% when compared to the baseline period. Yet, precipitation results contradict recent observations highlighting GCMs deficiencies to capture precipitation dynamics in Easter ENSO-dominated regions. As such, this study unveils the level of vulnerability of the agricultural lands which also indirectly impacts additional natural, human, and economic sectors of the islands. Also, we expect that the results provided here, considering the given uncertainties, lead to stakeholders to frame the context to generate resilient and sustainable strategies to adapt the agricultural sector to climate change in the Galapagos Islands.
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Change history
14 October 2020
The original version of this chapter was revised due to author name was incorrectly mentioned. This has now been updated as “Homero A. Paltán” in the chapter opening page and front matter of the book.
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Mena, C.F., Paltán, H.A., Benitez, F.L., Sampedro, C., Valverde, M. (2020). Threats of Climate Change in Small Oceanic Islands: The Case of Climate and Agriculture in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador. In: Walsh, S.J., Riveros-Iregui, D., Arce-Nazario, J., Page, P.H. (eds) Land Cover and Land Use Change on Islands. Social and Ecological Interactions in the Galapagos Islands. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43973-6_5
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