Climate Change and Agriculture in South America: Impacts, Adaptation and Mitigation Potential.

In South America, the impact of ENSO-related climate variability on the agricultural sector is well documented, as well as impacts of other sources of climatic variability, such as anomalies in South Atlantic sea-surface temperatures (SST) that are significantly related to crop-yield variations in the Pampas region of Argentina (IPCC, 2007). The great uncertainty in yield projections due to climate change could be attributed to differences in the GCM or incremental scenario used, the time-slice and SRES scenario considered, the inclusion or not of CO₂ effects, and the site considered. Other uncertainties in yield impacts are derived from model inaccuracies and unmodelled processes. Despite great variability in yield projections, some behavior seems to be consistent over the region, such as the projected reduction in rice yields after the year 2010 and the increase in soybean yields when CO₂ effects are considered. Larger crop yield reductions could be expected in the future if the variance of temperatures were doubled. This paper presents an overview of the agricultural climate change impacts, adaptation, and mitigation for South America.