CIXPAG - Stockholm Environment Institute, University of York

Interaction of climate extremes, air pollution and agro-ecosystems (CiXPAG).

Climate change and food security constitute key challenges to our society in this century. CiXPAG has a clear innovative part linking changes in climate extremes and pollution effects on agricultural production. Novel methods will be developed to incorporate ground-level ozone pollution fluxes in statistical crop models and the estimation of crop yields. Socio-economic methods will inform the integration of regional climate and pollutant modelling methods to provide an integrated assessment of agricultural productivity under different climate and pollutant regimes, which will contribute to the framing of effective climate change adaptation strategies and air pollution regulations.

State-of-the-art global and regional climate model simulations will be combined with statistical downscaling approaches to provide better information on climate extremes relevant to agriculture. The project will develop a flux-based approach in ozone chemistry and climate models. A novel and more consistent approach to include the ozone effect in statistical crop growth models will increase understanding of the interplay of environmental factors, such as downscaled climate information and air pollution, on agricultural ecosystems.

The development of these models will be informed by field experiments describing the effect of climate and ozone on selected crops. The modelling results will be embedded in the particular socio-economic and political context of the study region (Indo-Gangetic-Plain, India) that contributes substantially to regional and global food supply, but is threatened by climate extremes and air pollution. A contextualized understanding of potential responses will be jointly developed by farmers, researchers and policy makers to support effective climate change adaptation and air pollution regulation measures. Knowledge generated in CiXPAG will be relevant also for other significant food producing and exporting countries and regions (e.g., Europe, Brazil).

CiXPAG will build up expertise in a relatively new and vital research field for Norwegian climate research. CiXPAG focuses on an important food producing region and knowledge gained in this project can be applied to other regions.

SEI York Staff: Lisa Emberson (PI); David Gillies, Jon Ensor

Partners: CICERO; University of Oslo; Norwegian Meteorological Institute; University of Vanarasi, India; Sustainable Atmosphere for the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal; University Federal de Vicosa, Brazil.

Funder: Norwegian Research Council; £132k March 2015 – March 2019. Grant 244551