Impact of climate change on agro-climatic zones in Europe under different RCPs

<p>The rise of surface temperature due to climate change has a significant impact on the growth of different plant species, including aromatic plants, agricultural crops, fruit trees, and forests. Within the framework of the MICROSERVICES project, that aims on improving the capacity to predict the cascading effects of climate change on microbial diversity, crop-microbiome interactions and agricultural ecosystem functions, we studied the future projection of agro-climatic zones over Europe under two different IPCC Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5). To this end, an ensemble of 11 bias-corrected EURO-CORDEX simulations covering the period 1981-2100 was used following the methodology of Ceglar et al. (2019)*. The agro-climatic zones were identified based on two temperature-related parameters, the Growing Season Length (GSL) and the Active Temperature Sum (ATS). The categorization into one of the 8 agro-climatic zones was implemented by applying the k-means clustering method for the reference period 1981-2010. Then, the agro-climatic zone patterns over Europe for the intermediate period 2031-2060 and the end-of-the-century period 2071-2100 were compared against that of the reference period. Our results point towards a strong northward shift of the agroclimatic zones, especially under the no-mitigation emission scenario (RCP8.5) at the end of the century. For the moderate mitigation scenario (RCP4.5), a significant shift of the agroclimatic zones is also observed for the intermediate and the end-of-the-century periods for extended areas in Europe. Our results are in line with that of Ceglar et al. (2019), who studied the migration of agro-climatic zones over Europe under the 2 ^oC warming level utilizing a subset of the simulations used in this study. *<em>Ceglar et al., Earth's Future, 7, 1088-1101, https://doi.org/10.1029/2019EF001178, 2019.</em></p><p>This research was supported by the MICROSERVICES project funded by the General Secretariat for Research and Innovation (GSRI, Greece) under the Action ERANETs 2021A [Call ID: 037KE - A/A MIS 4888] (Project Number: T12ERA5-00075) and through the 2019-2020 BiodivERsA joint call for research proposals [BiodivClim ERA-Net COFUND programme].</p>