Opportunities and Risks of Agrosystems & forests in response to CLimate, socio-economic and policy changEs in France (and Europe) – ORACLE

ORACLE aims at providing spatially-gridded assessments of potential future changes in a) the functioning of agro-ecosystems, b) land uses in France at rather high resolution (8 x 8 km2) and in Europe at medium resolution (50 x 50 km2). These assessments involve the production of tools and data to study the relationships between climate change and possible changes in land use, together with the impacts of changing policies.
We will focus our analysis and modeling on the main components of the non-urban land use, namely crops, grasslands and forests. We will study their production as well as their environmental functionalities (GHG emission, hydrology, soil carbon storage) and develop a small set of relevant indicators. Climate-induced changes in those indicators will be analyzed and, wherever possible, their upper and lower limits will be defined. This will allow us to assess, per grid-cell, risks of dis-functioning of specific systems, potential disappearance of present-day land-uses, and potentialities of appearance of new ones. We will also try to combine the indicators with water availability to identify potential future hot-spots in France and Europe, i.e., grid-cells or regions that may experience drastic land-use changes.
Insights on land-use change will be obtained following two parallel methodologies. First, we will use the climatically-induced variations of the above-mentioned indicators to explore reshaping of farming systems, optimizing opportunities and minimizing constraints, without accounting for changes in socio-economic drivers. The propositions will rely on a) meta-analysis of published data on agronomic performances and environmental impacts of cultivation systems, and b) expert knowledge.
In the second methodology, we will jointly evaluate the impacts of changes in climatic and socio-economic drivers on anthropogenic land-uses. We will rank those impacts and identify areas where the impacts of climate change on land-uses may overrule those resulting from socio-economic changes. We will also attempt to estimate land-use change between agriculture and forest when both climatic and economic drivers change.
Results will be obtained i) at three spatial scales, namely Europe, France and hydrological basin (Seine and Rhine basins), ii) for two time horizons (2020-2050 and 2070-2100) in reference to the 1970-2000 period. Both prospective uncertainty (socio-economic scenarios, crop or forest management) and epistemic uncertainty (due to imperfect knowledge within models) will be analyzed at various levels through multi-model and multi-scenario approaches and appropriate statistical analysis. Results of the uncertainty analysis will be used as an input for modeling anticipative adaptation decisions in the economic models.
In terms of methodology, the main idea of the project is to rely on well-known models (global vegetation models, agronomic and forest models, economic models) and on published experimental data, and profit from existing methods (climate downscaling, meta-analysis, indicator reckoning…) and databases developed within the framework of previous projects on climate change impacts, in an integrated and coordinated way.
ORACLE is a true multi-disciplinary project that brings together climatologists, crop and forest scientists, economists, hydrologists and statisticians who have an experience in climate change issues at various scales. Many of the partners involved have already worked together on shared scientific objectives (national and European programs), and this makes us confident that our collaboration in ORACLE will be efficient. It is expected to deliver valuable information to the 5th assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (WG II & III).