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Climate adaptation through crop migration requires a nexus perspective for environmental sustainability in the North China Plain

Nature Food volume 5, pages 569–580 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Crop migration can moderate the impacts of global warming on crop production, but its feedback on the climate and environment remains unknown. Here we develop an integrated framework to capture the climate impacts and the feedback of adaptation behaviours with the land–water–energy–carbon nexus perspective and identify opportunities to achieve the synergies between climate adaptation and environmental sustainability. We apply the framework to assess wheat and maize migration in the North China Plain and show that adaptation through wheat migration could increase crop production by ~18.5% in the 2050s, but at the cost of disproportional increment in land use (~19.2%), water use (~20.2%), energy use (~19.5%) and carbon emissions (~19.9%). Irrigation and fertilization management are critical mitigation opportunities in the framework, through which wheat migration can be optimized to reduce the climatic and environmental impacts and avoid potential carbon leakage. Our work highlights the sustainable climate adaptation to mitigate negative environmental externalities.

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Fig. 1: Conceptual framework of sustainable climate adaptation with a nexus perspective.
Fig. 2: County-level land–water–energy–carbon nexus of wheat production in NCP in 2010.
Fig. 3: Environmental implications associated with climate impacts and adaptation.
Fig. 4: The environmental impact analysis for projected wheat production in NCP in the 2050s under various scenarios.
Fig. 5: Environmental impacts of international wheat trade versus self-sufficiency in NCP.

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Data availability

Historical climate data are from National Meteorological Information Centre of China (https://data.cma.cn/en); future climate data are from ISIMIP3b (https://www.isimip.org/); county-level agricultural data are mainly from Xu et al.13, obtained from Agricultural Information Institute of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (http://aii.caas.net.cn/); country-level agricultural data for trade scenarios are mainly from FAOSTAT (https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data). All the data that support the crop migration simulation and scenario analyses of this study are from public sources clearly referenced in the main text and Supplementary Information. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The Stata 14.0 and R 3.5.1 codes and Microsoft Office Suite 2019 used for data processing, analysis and visualization during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant 72174085 to B.L. and 71921003 to J.B.) and Jiangsu Provincial Department of Science and Technology (grant BK20221448 and BK20220012 to B.L.). W.G. acknowledges support from Peking University-BHP Carbon and Climate Wei-Ming PhD Scholars (WM202306). We also thank B. Lu (Nanjing University) and Y. Xue (Nanjing University) for their effort into the visualization of this study. We acknowledge the support from the Independent Project of State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control and Resource Reuse.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Weiyi Gu, Guosong Ma.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control and Resource Reuse School of Environment, Nanjing University, Nanjing, P. R. China

    Weiyi Gu, Guosong Ma, Rui Wang, Jun Bi & Beibei Liu

  2. Institute of Energy, Environment and Economy, Tsinghua University, Beijing, P. R. China

    Guosong Ma

  3. Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Laura Scherer

  4. School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Pan He

  5. State Key Laboratory of Soil and Sustainable Agriculture, Changshu National Agro-Ecosystem Observation and Research Station, Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, P. R. China

    Longlong Xia

  6. Institute for Meteorology and Climate Research, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany

    Longlong Xia

  7. College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, P. R. China

    Yuyao Zhu

  8. The Johns Hopkins University–Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies, Nanjing, P. R. China

    Beibei Liu

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Contributions

B.L. and W.G. designed the research study. G.M., W.G. and R.W. performed the analyses, with additional support from L.X. for the meta-analysis. W.G., G.M. and R.W. produced the figures. W.G. and G.M. wrote the original draft; L.S., P.H., Y.Z., J.B. and B.L. further revised the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Jun Bi or Beibei Liu.

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Nature Food thanks Shiliang Liu, Shu Kee Lam and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Sections 1 (Penman–Monteith equation), 2 (Supplementary Tables 1–45) and 3 (Supplementary Figs. 1–16 and references).

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Source data

Source Data Fig. 2

County-level land–water–energy–carbon nexus of wheat production in NCP in 2010.

Source Data Fig. 3

Environmental implications associated with climate impacts and adaptation.

Source Data Fig. 4

The environmental impact analysis for projected wheat production in NCP in the 2050s under various scenarios.

Source Data Fig. 5

Environmental impacts of international wheat trade versus self-sufficiency in NCP.

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Gu, W., Ma, G., Wang, R. et al. Climate adaptation through crop migration requires a nexus perspective for environmental sustainability in the North China Plain. Nat Food 5, 569–580 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-024-01008-8

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