References

GMD

Geoscientific Model Development

GMD

Geosci. Model Dev.

1991-9603

Copernicus Publications

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/gmd-7-2359-2014

Grassland production under global change scenarios for New Zealand pastoral agriculture

Keller

E. D.

¹ Baisden

W. T.

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1814-1306

¹ Timar

¹ ² Mullan

³ Clark

³ ⁴

GNS Science, Lower Hutt, New Zealand

Motu Economic and Public Policy Research, Wellington, New Zealand

NIWA, Wellington, New Zealand

now at: New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, Orange, NSW, Australia

16 10 2014

7 5 2359 2391

2014

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

This article is available from https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/7/2359/2014/gmd-7-2359-2014.html

The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/7/2359/2014/gmd-7-2359-2014.pdf

We adapt and integrate the Biome-BGC and Land Use in Rural New Zealand models to simulate pastoral agriculture and to make land-use change, intensification of agricultural activity and climate change scenario projections of New Zealand's pasture production at time slices centred on 2020, 2050 and 2100, with comparison to a present-day baseline. Biome-BGC model parameters are optimised for pasture production in both dairy and sheep/beef farm systems, representing a new application of the Biome-BGC model. Results show up to a 10% increase in New Zealand's national pasture production in 2020 under intensification and a 1–2% increase by 2050 from economic factors driving land-use change. Climate change scenarios using statistically downscaled global climate models (GCMs) from the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report also show national increases of 1–2% in 2050, with significant regional variations. Projected out to 2100, however, these scenarios are more sensitive to the type of pasture system and the severity of warming: dairy systems show an increase in production of 4% under mild change but a decline of 1% under a more extreme case, whereas sheep/beef production declines in both cases by 3 and 13%, respectively. Our results suggest that high-fertility systems such as dairying could be more resilient under future change, with dairy production increasing or only slightly declining in all of our scenarios. These are the first national-scale estimates using a model to evaluate the joint effects of climate change, CO2 fertilisation and N-cycle feedbacks on New Zealand's unique pastoral production systems that dominate the nation's agriculture and economy. Model results emphasise that CO2 fertilisation and N-cycle feedback effects are responsible for meaningful differences in agricultural systems. More broadly, we demonstrate that our model output enables analysis of decoupled land-use change scenarios: the Biome-BGC data products at a national or regional level can be re-sampled quickly and cost-effectively for specific land-use change scenarios and future projections.

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