Adapting agriculture to climate change – communicating the role of soil ecosystem services for mitigating agricultural risks

Changing precipitation patterns and more frequent and more intense extreme weather events projected by future climate scenarios pose considerable risks for the Swedish agricultural sector. One way to adapt agriculture to the negative effects is the conservation of soil organic carbon through favourable agricultural management practices.
In the project we will, firstly, quantify the risk and consequences, agricultural and economic, for farmers of failing to adjust or to implement soil management to abate foreseen climate changes and, secondly, investigate the role of climate scenarios and science-based projections of future crop yields and profits for farmers’ willingness to adapt their management practices to climate change. The project has a regional focus on southern Sweden.
We will develop and apply an extended version of the C-Bank model to quantify and visualize the effects of future climate changes on crop yields and profits for farms in southern Sweden. Further, we will estimate the costs and benefits of measures to conserve soil organic carbon to adapt farms to climate change. This information will be presented to farmers to investigate the role of farm-specific information for farmers’ willingness to adopt climate adaptation measures.

This project is finansed by BECC.