Credit: ©iStockphoto.com/Flavio Vallenari

Climate change expected by 2050 will trim precipitation in many parts of Europe, forcing farmers to mitigate the loss of rainfall or risk crop failures.

To estimate future crop yields, Jørgen Olesen, an agronomist at Aarhus University, Denmark and his colleagues combined 11 agroclimatic indices — such as the length of the growing season and the date of the last frost — gathered from 86 sites across Europe between 1971 and 2000, with climate projections from three commonly used global models1. Overall, the results were consistent for all climate models across most portions of Europe. The multi-model average suggests that by 2050 the growing seasons in western France and across large swathes of southeastern Europe will become considerably hotter and drier, substantially reducing crop yields unless farmers boost soil moisture via irrigation, or plant drought-resistant crops, options that may not always be available.

Although most regions are expected to receive enough precipitation to produce crops without irrigation in most years by the middle of the century, rainfall will probably exhibit more year-to-year variability in the future, presenting farmers with a major crop-management challenge, the researchers contend.