Action needed for staple crops in the Andean-Amazon foothills because of climate change
- PDF / 5,419,678 Bytes
- 25 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 17 Downloads / 151 Views
Action needed for staple crops in the Andean-Amazon foothills because of climate change Lucila Marcela Beltrán-Tolosa 1,2 & Carlos Navarro-Racines 1,3 & Prajal Pradhan 4 Gisella S. Cruz-Garcia 1,5 & Reynaldo Solis 6 & Marcela Quintero 1
&
Received: 17 September 2019 / Accepted: 2 June 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
The Andean-Amazon foothills region, shaped by Andean moist forests and Amazon forests in southwestern Colombia, Napo province in Ecuador, and Ucayali Province and Napo Basin in Peru, provides local and global ecosystem services as food, water, world climate regulation, water purification, and carbon absorption. However, it faces major problems of land-use change that are exacerbated by climate change that affects these ecosystem services. For instance, conventional agriculture contribute to deforestation, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss, which might be further aggravated by climate change– induced droughts, thus reducing staple crop production and, consequently, food security. Cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz), maize (Zea mays L.), and plantain (Musa paradisiaca L.) are major staple crops in the region. They play a key role for food security and local farmers’ income but are highly exposed to climate risks. This article aims to quantify the level of exposure to climate change (measured as climatic suitability) of these crops in the Andean-Amazon foothills by using the EcoCrop model by the 2030s, 2050s, and 2080s under Representative Concentration Pathway 2.6, 4.5, and 8.5 scenarios. EcoCrop results showed that, whereas cassava will not lose climatic suitability, maize will lose more than half of its current suitable area, and plantain will gain and lose area, which would affect local food security. Globally, these results are important in highlighting adaptive and cost-effective strategies in agriculture and suggest that agricultural crop diversification may improve resilience by promoting the use of local crops varieties. Keywords Exposure . Cassava . Maize . Plantain . Crop climatic suitability . EcoCrop
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-02009923-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Lucila Marcela Beltrán-Tolosa [email protected]; [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change
1 Introduction The Andean-Amazon foothills (AAF) region, shaped by Andean moist forests and Amazon forests in the departments of Caquetá, Cauca, Nariño, and Putumayo in southwestern Colombia, Napo province in Ecuador, and Ucayali Province and Napo Basin in Peru, has a vital role in world climate regulation and the provision of other ecosystem services such as water purification and carbon absorption. Also, people and indigenous communities living in the AAF directly depend on their resources to cover their necessities of water and food (FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Na
Data Loading...
