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Climate Change and Irrigation Water: Should the North/South Hierarchy of Impacts on Agricultural Systems Be Reconsidered?

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Abstract

Pressures on resources and climate change are likely to strongly impact the availability of water, which directly affects agricultural systems. To estimate these impacts, we develop a prospective approach combining an agricultural supply side economic model and a crop model. We extend previous work by incorporating water resource constraints and apply our model to a large part of the French agricultural sector under three climate scenarios over 2010–2010. Results indicate that, at a given water price, potential change in irrigation water demand would differ strongly according to the region concerned and the scenario applied. In France as a whole, irrigation increases in all scenarios, by 60% under the intermediate scenario, by 40% under the least extreme scenario, and by 20% under the toughest scenario. Differentiating the northern and southern regions, the relative increase is more pronounced in the north, while demand in the south significantly increases under the intermediate scenario and decreases under the toughest scenario. When considering autonomous adaptation of farming systems to climate change, agricultural income in northern regions is likely to be negatively affected to a greater extent than in southern regions.

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Notes

  1. http://www.gesteau.fr/document/bilan-du-projet-explore-2070-eau-et-changement-climatique

  2. Gross margin is commonly defined as the difference between farmers’ revenues and their variable costs.

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Acknowledgments

Public institutions associated with the PIREN-Seine program, the French Ministry of Research and Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon are gratefully acknowledged for their financial support. This work is part of the “Investissements d’Avenir” program overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR) (LabEx BASC; ANR-11-LABX-0034). The authors thank Michael Westlake for his copy-editing and Jeffrey Norville for helpful comments on the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UMR Économie Publique, INRAE, Université Paris-Saclay, F-78850, Grignon, France

    Delphine Barberis, Ines Chiadmi, Pierre Humblot, Pierre-Alain Jayet, Anna Lungarska & Maxime Ollier

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  1. Delphine Barberis
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  2. Ines Chiadmi
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  3. Pierre Humblot
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Correspondence to Pierre-Alain Jayet.

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Appendix

Appendix

Fig. 9
figure 9

Summary indicators for precipitations derived from the ARPEGE simulations for the A1B SRES scenario of the IPCC [22, 23]

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Fig. 10
figure 10

Summary indicators for temperatures derived from the ARPEGE simulations for the A1B SRES scenario of the IPCC [22, 23]

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Fig. 11
figure 11

Evolution of water demand in the north “fra1” (on the left) and south (on the right) of France “fra2” for the A1b scenario over period from 2010 to 2100 (averages per decade) by region for the A1B CC scenario. Legend: 121—Île-de-France; 131—Champagne-Ardenne; 132—Picardie; 133—Haute-Normandie; 134—Centre; 135—Basse-Normandie; 136—Bourgogne; 141—Nord-Pas-de-Calais; 151—Lorraine; 152—Alsace; 153—Franche-Comté; 162—Pays de la Loire; 163—Bretagne; 164—Poitou-Charentes; 182—Aquitaine; 183—Midi-Pyrénées; 184—Limousin; 192—Rhône-Alpes; 193—Auvergne; 201—Languedoc-Roussillon; 203—Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur; 204—Corse

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Fig. 12
figure 12

Impact of changes in water price by increasing level from 1 up to 6, respectively on gross margin (top row, billion euros), demand for irrigation water (middle row, billion cubic meters), and demand for N-mineral fertilizer (bottom row, million metric tons), distributed over the period 2010–2100 for France as a whole and for three climate projections (B1, A1B, and A2). Vertical red lines refer to the benchmark (AROPAj baseline results for 2009)

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Fig. 13
figure 13

Impact of changes in water price by increasing level from 1 up to 6, on wheat activity, respectively with regard to area (million hectares), marketed and on-farm quantity (million tons), and demand for irrigation water (billion cubic meters), from the left column to the right column, distributed over the period 2010–2100 for southern France (top row), northern France (middle row), and the whole of France (bottom row) for the A1B climate projections. Vertical red lines refer to the benchmark (AROPAj baseline results for 2009)

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Table 1 Regional impact of water price change on demand for irrigation, for three decades in the A1B CC scenario, 2011–2020, 2051–2060, and 2091–2100, expressed as a % compared with demand with 0-change water prices (on gray lines—absolute value averaged per decade of required irrigation in million cubic meters). Baseline prices are from 2009
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Barberis, D., Chiadmi, I., Humblot, P. et al. Climate Change and Irrigation Water: Should the North/South Hierarchy of Impacts on Agricultural Systems Be Reconsidered?. Environ Model Assess 26, 13–36 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10666-020-09724-8

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