Assessing the adaptive capacity of agriculture in the Netherlands to the impacts of climate change under different market and policy scenarios (AgriAdapt project).
The AgriAdapt project has developed methodologies that enable (a) the assessment of impacts, risks and resiliencies for agriculture under changes in climatic conditions but also under changes of other drivers (market, technology, policy, etc.) and (b) the evaluation of adaptation strategies at farm type and regional scale. The methodologies are applied to arable farming over Europe and in a more integrated way, to that in Flevoland, the Netherlands as the key case. The methodologies at European level include (a) Crop modelling and (b) Market modelling. The methodologies at regional level cover the following main areas: (a) Integrated sustainability assessment, (b) Development of scenarios of farm structural change towards 2050, (c) Calculation of crop yields for different scenarios in 2050 inclusive agro-climate calendars, and (d) Partial and fully integrated analysis of farming systems in 2050, inclusive the aggregation to the regional level. Results from the application of the different methodologies are presented here. For example, exploring future farming systems shows that the most important driving factors towards 2050 within the A1-W scenario with a globalized economy, are (a) the yield increase due to climate change, (b) the expected product price change and (c) the degree of innovation in crop productivity. The effects of climate change are projected to have a positive economic effect on arable farming
