Elsevier

Agricultural Systems

Volume 165, September 2018, Pages 164-176
Agricultural Systems

Farm-level adaptation to climate change: The case of the Loam region in Belgium

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2018.06.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • •
    An agro-economic model for land-use adaptation to climate change is proposed.
  • •
    Climate change negatively affects summer root crops.
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    Land-use adaptation would economically compensate for crop yield losses.
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    Gains from adaptation can reach 14% in the Loam region in Belgium.

Abstract

Few studies have addressed the topic of farmers' adaptation to climate change from a multidisciplinary perspective, because of the difficulty in assessing their impacts. In view of the growing concern in the agricultural sector on this issue, we analyzed farm-level adaptation through arable land-use changes in the specific case of the Loam region in Belgium. With this aim, we used an agro-economic model which considered 20-year series of current and projected simulated yields with and without considering additional farming practices to reduce crop stress, such as irrigation and soil and water conservation techniques. Agronomic results show that climate change will negatively affect summer crop yields, particularly sugar beet and potatoes. However, we also show that adaptation to climate change through land-use changes can compensate for crop yield losses and lead to utility gains. These are obtained by reducing the share of land allocated to summer crops and barley and by increasing the surface allocated to less vulnerable crops such as winter wheat. Finally, irrigation practices would not be justified in the Loam region under climate change, since their use would incur important financial costs for farmers.

Introduction

Scientific climate change reports (IPCC, 2007, IPCC, 2008, IPCC, 2014) predict important economic and environmental impacts on human activities. Agriculture is especially sensitive to climatic conditions and is one of the most vulnerable sectors to climate change (Bradshaw et al. (2004)). In particular, changes in precipitation, temperature, extreme weather events and CO2 levels are expected, which are not uniform across European regions (Trnka et al. (2011); Iglesias and Garrote (2015)) and may impact on agricultural activities in EU regions in different ways depending on their adaptive capacity. In this context, research on adaptation becomes necessary in order to mitigate climate change impacts on agriculture.
Although there is relatively recent literature about farmers' adaptation strategies for climate variability and change, a large number of studies have dealt with the topic by considering different adaptation measures. These include farm practices such as irrigation and soil conservation techniques (e.g. Finger et al. (2011)), land-use (e.g. Kaiser et al. (1993); Klein et al. (2013); Liu et al. (2016b)), technology adoption (e.g. Foudi and Erdlenbruch (2012)), and financial support (e.g. Berrang-Ford et al. (2011) among others. While most studies consider gradual climate change, i.e. long-term changes to average climate conditions, agriculture is particularly vulnerable to extreme weather conditions1 such as more frequent droughts and deviation from ‘normal’ growing season conditions (Smit and Skinner (2002)).
For this reason, in recent years, an important number of studies have addressed the topic of extreme weather impacts on crop performance and yields (e.g. Thornton et al. (2014); Trnka et al. (2014); Powell and Reinhard (2016); Harrison et al. (2016); Lesk et al. (2016)), mostly focusing on drought (White et al. (2011)) and heat stress (Liu et al. (2016a); Deryng et al. (2014)). In addition, literature about adaptation to extreme events due to climate change has attracted considerable attention (see for example Olesen et al. (2011) and Trnka et al. (2014) for European studies). However, existing research has focused mainly on crop-level adaptation, while more research is still needed on measures, costs and adoption rates for adaptation at farm level, as argued by Mandryk et al. (2017).
In this paper, we concentrate on farmers' adaptation to climate change impacts in the Loam region of Belgium, as well as on farm-level utility outputs from these adaptations.2 The Loam region, situated in Central Belgium, was formed on quaternary loess and has the best soils for arable agriculture in Belgium. Climate models predict a shift in climate conditions to drier summers and wetter winters in Belgium by the end of this century. Warmer temperatures could positively impact some crops such as winter wheat (Belgian National Climate Comission (2010) Hoyaux et al. (2010)). However, the expected increase in extreme events3 such as heatwaves and longer drought periods, may have a negative influence on summer crops such as potatoes (cf. Hoyaux et al. (2010); Gobin (2012)). A large number of studies in the Netherlands (e.g. Mandryk et al. (2017); Schaap et al. (2013)), where climate conditions are similar, have gone further in assessing the economic impact of crop and farm-level adaptations and have shown that a shift to more winter wheat in systems dominated by root crops could be an efficient strategy in order to maintain economic and soil quality objectives. In addition, drip irrigation for potatoes could be a good option to counteract the potential impact of heatwaves. Indeed, farmers' adaptation measures such as changes in crop choices and farming practices such as irrigation and soil management are mainly expected to mitigate climate change impacts in Central and Western Europe (see Olesen et al. (2011) for a european reviews). The aim of this paper is to analyze farmers' adaptation through land-use changes to climate change, with and without considering additional farm practices such as irrigation and soil and water conservation techniques.
Different methods are employed in the literature to study the general topic of adaptation to climate variability and change, e.g. anthropological approaches (Jahangir Kabir et al. 2017), econometric models (see Seo and Mendelsohn (2008); Mu et al. (2013)) and integrated models (see for example Kaiser et al. (1993) for an agro-economic model and Schaap et al. (2013) for a crop growth model, combined with a participatory approach) at different levels of decision-making (global, regional and farm levels). Several studies advocate interdisciplinary modelling approaches (e.g. Falloon and Betts (2010); Reidsma et al. (2015); Antle and Stöckle (2017)). Reidsma et al. (2015) argued that integrated approaches provide added value compared to disciplinary research as they allow a better understanding of the complexity of the system. In addition, Jahangir Kabir et al. (2017) claim that understanding local perspectives, farm-level adaptation and risk management strategies is critically important for supporting decision making.
In this study, we focused on the use of an agro-economic model at the farm level. Firstly, a dynamic crop model (REGCROP) was used to build yield time series under current and projected climatic conditions (Gobin, 2010, Gobin, 2012), which used a stochastic weather generator (LARS-WG) and incorporated the effect of drought and heat stress on crop growth. Yield simulations were subsequently used as inputs to the economic component of the model - a Positive Mathematical Programming (PMP) framework which took into account risk in farm decision-making. Some authors have already used this methodology for economic assessments (e.g. Paris and Arfini (2000); Cortigiani and Severini (2012); Petsakos and Rozakis (2015)). We have chosen for the approach of Cortignani and Severini in Cortigiani and Severini (2012), which estimates the absolute risk aversion coefficient along with the non-linear cost function and the resource shadow price with a maximum entropy program. However, we fixed the resource shadow price to the the rental price of the land in the study area in order to avoid the criticized first step of traditional PMP models (cf. Heckelei and Wolff (2003)).
In addition, we adapted the Cortignani and Severini model (cf. Cortigiani and Severini (2012)) to simulate land allocation of a hypothetical arable farm in the Loam region. We consider our results to have strong implications at the regional scale, since crop acreages and yields represent those of the region. Overall, the main goal of our study is to investigate what land-use allocations are consistent with maximizing farm-level utility over a 20-year period with projected climate change series, and selected adaptation measures. More specifically, simulated crop impacts, land-use changes and farmers' utility outputs, with and without land-use adaptation, are compared for different scenarios, i.e. under current and future projected climatic conditions, with and without considering the application of additional measures to reduce crop stress, such as irrigation and soil and water conservation techniques. Finally, the impact of important economic factors on model outputs such as the uncertainty about future crop prices under climate change is also analyzed.

Section snippets

An agro-economic model of land-use choice

The general methodology consisted of the use of an integrated approach with agronomic and economic components. It has been extensively shown that farmers performed differently depending on their main individual objectives (Mandryk et al. (2017)), which in most of the surveys (see Mandryk et al. (2014) for an example) can be classified into biophysical (e.g. crop performance, soil quality…) and economic goals (e.g. maximizing gross margin of crops per hectare). Economic objectives should then be

Data from the Loam region

We applied the theoretical model to a hypothetical12 arable farm of 100 ha in the Loam region in the centre of Belgium (see Belgian agricultural regions in Fig. 2).
The main part of the Loam region is situated in the region of Wallonia. The Quaternary loam layer is as deep as 20 m in some parts of the region, constituting

Land-use adaptation to climate change

Results of simulated surfaces allocated to winter wheat, winter barley, sugar beet, late potatoes and grain maize for a hypothetical farm of 100 ha, obtained for the different modelling scenarios are presented in Table 4. First of all, we analyze land-use adaptation to climate change without considering irrigation measures and soil and water conservation techniques, i.e. the comparison between scenarios Now (column 3) and Climate Change (column 4) in Table 4. Simulation results show that the

Discussion

Recent studies have argued that the projected changes in weather patterns due to climate change, and in particular the expected increase in mean temperature, could be beneficial for agricultural systems in Central and Northern Europe (Trnka et al. (2011)). However, IPCC reports underline the uncertain consequences of other climate change impacts such as the increase in the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events due to climate change. In particular, in Belgium, a progressive shift to

Conclusions

We analyzed farm-level adaptation through land-use changes to climate change, for the specific case of the Loam region, in Belgium. For this purpose, we used an interdisciplinary model with agronomic and economic components. The main contribution of the paper is the economic assessment of climate change impacts in land-use choices in the Loam region, in Belgium. We showed that land-use adaptation to climate change consisted of an increase in the share of land allocated to wheat and a reduction

Acknowledgements

This work has been funded by the Belgian Science Policy Office (Belspo) under the “Meteorological risks as drivers of environmental innovation in agro-ecosystem management” (Merinova) project, with reference SD/RI/03A.

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