Climate change and food stress in Russia: what if the market transforms as it did during the past century?

Abstract

It is expected that a warmer climate would be beneficial for agriculture in high latitudes. However, this general tendency is not necessarily true for all northern countries, as a short growing period is not the only factor limiting agriculture. For Russia, our model shows that the remarkable increase in potential yield in central and northern-forested regions would not compensate for a sharp drop in yields due to increasing frequency of droughts in the currently most productive southern European regions. If this scenario is indeed realized, the majority of Russian regions will continue to rely on import of agricultural products from a few regions with the best soils, and a system of interregional grain trade will remain critical for food security. However, the basic rules of interregional food market have varied widely over the past century. We have attempted an analysis of the potential impact of these basic rules on regional food security by describing four basic historical market scenarios and applying these scenarios to our results for climate change impact on agriculture in the 2020s and 2070s. We show that the current system, if it continues, would bring the worst results. We also show that the traditionally effective planned adaptation measures would help little in future climate conditions if the current market system were still in place.

Grain Production Trends in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan in the Context of the Global Climate Variability and Change

“…Despite significant differences in the range of changes among the scenarios produced by different models, the majority of models tend to agree that summer precipitation is likely to decline all over the region and winter precipitation is projected to increase in parts of European Russia and Siberia [3,4]. The models disagree about the range and pattern of precipitation changes.…”

“…Lioubimtseva and Henebry [5] [20]. All AOGCMs predict that under any policy scenario, maximum temperatures are likely to increase by 2050 both in summer and in winter; increases of the mean and maximum summer temperatures in combination with mean precipitation decreases, and droughts may become more likely [3].…”

“…Dronin and Kirilenko [3] and Alcamo et al [28] have shown that although large portions of Russia might increase their agricultural potential under warming scenarios, agriculture of the most productive chernozem zone in the Russia and Ukraine, area between the Black and the Caspian Seas, could experience a dramatic increase in drought frequency. These regions are the main commercial producers of wheat and any decline in productivity would be detrimental to exports [5].…”

“…These assessments are based on modeling changes and geographic shifts of mean temperature and precipitation, but do not take into account how changes in climate variability and extreme events might be detrimental to crop production. Numerous studies have documented that extreme events are disproportionately responsible for weather-related damages and, furthermore, the sensitivity of extreme events to climate change may be greater than simple linear projections of climatological distributions [3,28,58]. The potential changes in variability and extreme events -frosts, heat waves, droughts, and deluges -are likely to have stronger impacts on food production than modest temporal shifts in mean temperature and minor changes in precipitation.…”

“…Global grain stocks and prices in 2000-2012 have been particularly volatile as a complex result of political, economic, and environmental factors, including shifting allocation of grain production towards biofuel, increasing global oil prices, changes in food consumption patterns in Asia, and the disruption of food production due to poor harvests in Europe and Australia [1], and massive withdrawal of arable lands in the newly independent countries of the former USSR [2][3][4][5]. With abundant highly fertile but under-utilized lands the grain-growing countries of the former USSR, such as Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, have an opportunity to take a lead on the global market and become top beneficiaries of this rapidly changing food-production landscape if they manage to increase their productivity.…”