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152942 - The Impacts of Climate Change on the Irrigation Water Demand, Grain Yield, and Biomass Yield of Wheat Crop in Nepal.pdf (4.81 MB)

Impacts of climate change on irrigation water demand, grain yield, and biomass yield of winter wheat in Nepal

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-21, 13:09 authored by Kaini, S, Matthew HarrisonMatthew Harrison, Gardner, T, Nepal, S, Sharma, AK
The Nepalese Sunsari Morang Irrigation district is the lifeblood of millions of people in the Koshi River basin. Despite its fundamental importance to food security, little is known about the impacts of climate change on future irrigation demand and grain yields in this region. Here, we examined the impacts of climate change on the irrigation demand and grain yield of wheat crop. Climate change was simulated using Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) of 4.5 and 8.5 for three time horizons (2016–2045, 2036–2065, and 2071–2100) in the Agricultural Production Systems Simulator (APSIM). For the field data’s measured period (2018–2020), we showed that farmers applied only 25% of the irrigation water required to achieve the maximum potential grain yield. Actual yields were less than 50% of the potential yields. Projected irrigation water demand is likely to increase for RCP4.5 (3%) but likely to decrease under RCP8.5 (8%) due to the truncated crop duration and lower maturity biomass by the end of the 21st century. However, simulated yields declined by 20%, suggesting that even irrigation will not be enough to mitigate the severe and detrimental effects of climate change on crop production. While our results herald positive implications for irrigation demand in the region, the implications for regional food security may be dire

Funding

Meat and Livestock Australia

Integrity Ag & Environment

History

Publication title

Water

Volume

14

Issue

17

Article number

2728

Number

2728

Pagination

1-17

ISSN

2073-4441

Department/School

Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture (TIA)

Publisher

MDPI

Place of publication

Switzerland

Rights statement

© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Climate change adaptation measures (excl. ecosystem); Climate variability (excl. social impacts); Management of water consumption by plant production