Impacts of tropospheric ozone and climate change on Mexico wheat production

Journal article, 2019

Wheat is an important staple crop sensitive to negative effects from elevated tropospheric ozone (O 3 ) concentrations, but the impacts of future O 3 concentrations on wheat production in Mexico are unknown. To determine these impacts, the O 3 -modified DSSAT-NWheat crop model was used to simulate wheat production in Mexico using a baseline scenario with pre-industrial O 3 concentrations from 1980 to 2010 and five Global Climate Models (GCMs) under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 scenario from 2041 to 2070 paired with future O 3 concentrations from the European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (EMEP) Meteorological Synthesizing Centre–West (MSC-W) model. Thirty-two representative major wheat-producing locations in Mexico were simulated assuming both irrigated and rainfed conditions for two O 3 sensitivity cultivar classifications. The simulations showed large variability (after averaging over 30 years) in yield loss, ranging from 7 to 26% because of O 3 impact, depending on the location, irrigation, and climate change emissions scenario. After upscaling and aggregating the simulations to the country scale based on observed irrigated and rainfed production, national wheat production for Mexico is expected to decline by 12% under the future RCP 8.5 climate change scenario with additional losses of 7 to 18% because of O 3 impact, depending on the cultivar O 3 sensitivity. This yield loss caused by O 3 is comparable with, or even larger than, the impact from projected future climatic change in temperature, rainfall, and atmospheric CO 2 concentration. Therefore, O 3 impacts should be considered in future agricultural impact assessments.