What can scenario modelling tell us about future European scale agricultural land use, and what not?

Abstract

Given scenarios describing future climates and socio-techno-economics, this study estimates the consequences for agricultural land use, combining models of crop growth and farm decision making to predict profitability over the whole of Europe, driven solely by soil and climate at each location. Each location is then classified by its profitability as intensive or extensive agriculture or not suitable for agriculture. The main effects of both climate and socio- economics were in the agriculturally marginal areas of Europe. The results showed the effect of different climates is relatively small, whereas there are large variations when economic scenarios are included. Only Finland's agricultural area significantly responds to climate by increasing at the expense of forests in several scenarios. Several locations show more difference due to climate model (PCM versus HadCM3) than emission scenario, because of large differences in predicted precipitation, notably the Ardennes switching to arable in HadCM3. Scenario modelling has identified several such regions where there is a need to be watchful, but few where all of the scenario results agree, suggesting great uncertainty in future projections. Thus, it has not been possible to predict any futures, though all results agree that in Central Europe, changes are likely to be relatively small