By John Reilly, U.S. Department of Agriculture

Agriculture is one of our nation's most vital and economically important industries and also one of the most sensitive to climate change. Agriculture sector co-chairs John Reilly (MIT) and Jeff Graham (U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resource Conservation Service) have finalized the membership of the sector assessment team which will contain members of regional assessment teams, ongoing agricultural assessment activities at the national level, and government agencies.

Several ongoing assessment-related research efforts will be tapped in preparing the sector assessment. For example, the Department of Energy funded National Institute for Global Environmental Change, which is sponsoring a series of crop modeling studies to assess what is known about climate change impacts on agriculture. This study is updating and reapplying a methodology employed by the Environmental Protection Agency in the late 1980s during the first effort to assess climate change impacts on the U.S. The sector assessment will utilize modeling work currently being conducted at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as part of its integrated global change assessment effort. Texas A&M University researchers have also used an agricultural economic model to show how climate change would affect agricultural income, consumers, exports, and regional production in the U.S. In addition, researchers at the Economic Research Service of USDA have capabilities that will be drawn upon for the agriculture assessment. They model impacts of climate change on agriculture production across the world, and are able to study how differential impacts on the U.S. and its foreign competitors might affect U.S. producers and consumers. Gaining insights from all of these efforts will provide the information needed to estimate possible impacts of climate change on the U.S. agricultural economy under the climate and socioeconomic scenarios being used for the assessment.

The agriculture sector team will also develop at least three case studies that will focus on particular aspects of agricultural impacts that are not captured well in existing models, including:

• Variability: Impacts on agriculture and responses by farmers to climate variability and changes in variability. Climate variability has the potential to significantly impact food production efficiency. For example, drought, floods, extreme heat, and storms can all cause severe losses. The sector team will therefore work closely with climatologists to develop meaningful agricultural impacts from potential shifts in climate variability.
• Indirect Impacts: The off-site impacts of possible changes in climate on the environment. Not all impacts connected to agriculture will be directly related to food production. For example, more intense rainfall is predicted as a likely result of a warmer world. If true, then soil erosion and run-off of animal waste into streams, lakes, estuaries, and coastal areas may become more difficult to control and impacts may occur far from the original sources.
• Uncertainty: Adaptation and response of farmers to climate change, and dealing with uncertainty in climate predictions. Climate may be changing but it is difficult over short periods to clearly separate the signal from the noise of normal variability. This case study will try to shed some light on what farmers can do that makes sense under these conditions.

The agriculture assessment team recently held its first planning meeting and will conduct their work over the next year with a follow-up review meeting planned for late August of 1999. Based on this schedule and with review, final editing and publication time requirements, a report is planned for publication in January of 2000. A significant effort will be made throughout the assessment process to encourage public comment and stakeholder involvement. To that end, the sector team will assemble a steering committee to provide guidance on the overall assessment effort. In addition, principal sessions of the planning and review meetings will be open to the public, and representatives of stakeholder groups, regional assessments, and other sectors will be invited to meetings and kept informed of progress. Finally, the report will be reviewed widely both for its technical quality and its relevance to stakeholder questions.

For more information, contact:

John Reilly, Joint Program On The Science And Policy Of Global Change; MIT E40-263, 1 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA 02139; phone: (617) 253-8040; e-mail: jreilly@mit.edu.