The risk to food security posed by global environmental change is one of the most significant threats to health and economic stability for a large fraction of the world’s population. Studies suggest a strong response of crops to climate variability and change, due to impacts of changes in e.g. water availability, and temperature (e.g. Challinor et al., 2014). In addition to climate, surface tropospheric ozone pollution is known to impact crop yield, by limitation of plant growth, acceleration of leaf senescence, and direct injury to leaf tissue (McKee et al., 1997). Several studies provide evidence of ozone-induced reduction in crop yield in sensitive major food crop species across Europe and North America (Hollaway et al., 2012), with an estimated annual cost to arable production of ~7 billion Euro and $2-4 billion respectively. Despite this progress in knowledge, few studies have integrated both climatic and ozone impacts, nor the dependence of these combined impacts on future emission mitigation scenarios.
The aim of the PhD is to quantify the combined impact of climate change and ozone on crop yield using the GLAM-ROC model (see below).A number of scenarios will be investigated, including current legislation, and a number of mitigation scenarios. The approach will be to investigate potential realistic emission pathways over the next 30-50 years, focusing on the climate (temperature, precipitation) and tropospheric ozone responses in these scenarios, and determining their coupled impacts on crop productivity. An important component of this work will be the development and evaluation of GLAM-ROC for combined stresses, particularly the co-occurrence of drought and ozone pollution, which is observed in several regions and is expected to occur with increasing frequency in a warmer climate. Driving data for ozone and climate variables are available from Earth system model simulations that submitted experiments covering numerous different future mitigation scenarios as part of the 6th Coupled Model Intercomparison project (CMIP6 – Eyring et al., 2016), including the contribution from the UK Earth System Model (UKESM1).
The study regions (e.g. India, Southern Europe) will be determined as part of the project, based on an initial analysis of ozone damage hotspots, and investigation of regions where potential interactions between drought stress and ozone stress may become increasingly important.
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