Historical patterns and drivers of global crop water demand.

Abstract:

With climate change expected to subject staple crops in major growing regions to increased heat exposure, a critical question for agriculture and global food security is the degree to which crop water demand is also likely to change. Recent work has explored the relationship between extreme temperatures and crop water demand, finding that vapor pressure deficit (VPD), through its dependence on both temperature and humidity, provides a very good meteorological predictor of water stress. However, assessing crop water demand solely through atmospheric conditions ignores the roles of radiation and transpiration efficiency, which are increased through elevated CO₂. We provide a 60-year global assessment of crop water demand in the world’s major growing areas, comparing trends and drivers across key growing regions. We find that an atmospheric-based demand measure can differ significantly from that of a crop-specific sink-based approach that incorporates radiation and CO₂ effects, sometimes enough to reverse the sign of historical trends. We also find that these changes differ significantly by region, and that multi-decadal trends can mask large decadal swings. To our knowledge, our work is the first to use global meteorological datasets in a global analysis of crop water demand, and should serve as a valuable reference for future work examining the interaction of hydrological, temperature, and CO₂ changes on crop yields.