ADAPTING NORTH-AMERICAN AGRICULTURE TO CLIMATE-CHANGE IN REVIEW

The adaptability of North American agriculture to climate change is as sessed through a review of current literature. A baseline of North Ame rican agriculture without climate change suggests that farming faces s erious challenges in the future (e.g. declining domestic demand, loss of comparative advantage, rising environmental costs). Climate change adjustments at the farm-level and in government policy, including inte rnational trade policy, are inventoried from the literature. The adapt ive potential of agriculture is demonstrated historically with situati ons that are analogous to climate change, including the translocation of crops across natural climate gradients, the rapid introduction of n ew crops such as soybeans in the US and canola in Canada, and resource substitutions prompted by changes in prices of production inputs. A w ide selection of modeling studies is reviewed which, in net, suggests several agronomic and economic adaptation strategies that are availabl e to agriculture. Agronomic strategies include changes in crop varieti es and species, timing of operations, and land management including ir rigation. Economic strategies include investment in new technologies, infrastructure and labor, and shifts in international trade. Overall, such agronomic strategies were found to offset either partially or com pletely the loss of productivity caused by climate change. Economic ad aptations were found to render the agricultural costs of climate chang e small by comparison with the overall expansion of agricultural produ ction. New avenues of adaptive research are recommended including the formalization of the incorporation of adaptation strategies into model ing, linkage of adaptation to the terrestrial carbon cycle, anticipati on of future technologies, attention to scaling from in situ modeling to the landscape scale, expansion of data sets and the measurement and modeling of unpriced costs. The final assessment is that climate chan ge should not pose an insurmountable obstacle to North American agricu lture. The portfolio of assets needed to adapt is large in terms of la nd, water, energy, genetic diversity, physical intrastructure and huma n resources, research capacity and information systems, and political institutions and world trade-the research reviewed here gives ample ev idence of the ability of agriculture to utilize such assets. In conclu sion, the apparent efficiency with which North American agriculture ma y adapt to climate changes provides little inducement for diverting ag ricultural adaptation resources to efforts to slow or halt the climate changes.