Potential for adaptation in Mediterranean croplands under climate change

DOI

The Mediterranean Basin has been identified as a global climate change hotspot due to projected above-average increases in warming and drying. Increasing scientific attention has therefore been drawn to the repercussions of climate change for the Mediterranean’s diverse and valued agricultural sector. The extent to which these repercussions vary throughout the region, owing to uneven adaptive capacities of farmers, remains however unquantified. We hereby present the results of a mapping study illustrating the potential to implement farm-level adaptations to increased drought and heat stress across Mediterranean croplands. The selected adaptations addressed the potential to implement (1) irrigation expansion in rain-fed areas, (2) drip irrigation within irrigated areas, (3-4) crop and crop variety changes, and the implementation of (5) reduced tillage and (6) conservation agriculture. The potentials are shown in a dimensionless index (between 1-10, indicating low to high suitability respectively), based on spatial proxies for the socio-economic and biophysical determinants of each adaptation, identified by reviewing scientific literature from the region. In combination with information on changing average climatic conditions, alongside frequency and duration of climatic extremes, these maps enable an exploration on the extent to which adaptation potentials align with adaptation needs under a changing climate. All files are at a 10km2 resolution. We refer the reader to the related publication and affiliated supplementary materials for a comprehensive overview of the methodological details.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/4LL5TV
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2022.103586
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/4LL5TV
Provenance
Creator Zagaria, Cecilia; Malek, Ziga; Schulp, Catharina; Verburg, Peter
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Schulp, Nynke
Publication Year 2023
Rights CC0 1.0; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0
OpenAccess true
Contact Schulp, Nynke (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format image/tiff; application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document; text/plain
Size 221072; 15702; 3154
Version 1.0
Discipline Agricultural Sciences; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Earth and Environmental Science; Environmental Research; Geosciences; Life Sciences; Natural Sciences