Marked Impacts of Pollution Mitigation on Crop Yields in China
Creators
-
1.
California Institute of Technology
-
2.
Carnegie Institution for Science
-
3.
University of Maryland, College Park
-
4.
Purdue University West Lafayette
-
5.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
-
6.
Jet Propulsion Lab
Abstract
Plant growth and crop harvest are impacted by both climate change and air pollution. However, their relative importance in crop yields remains elusive, especially in heavily polluted regions. Here we develop crop yield prediction models, based on a large volume of historical crop data, as well as climate and pollution records in China since 1980. A long-term surface ozone concentration data set is developed from a machine-learning model and various observations. An assessment of four climate and pollution factors reveals the critical role of particulate and ozone pollution in regulating interannual variations of crop yields in China. During 2010–2018, we find that the particulate pollution mitigation outweighs the negative impacts of concurrent climate change, resulting in 0.5%–1.9% net yield increases nationwide, despite of the ozone increases in the North China Plain. Looking to the future, the impacts of climate change, particularly from surface temperature increase, will dominate over pollution factors and profoundly reduce future maize and rice yields by 0.6 to 2.8% 10 yr−1 by 2050. Our findings call for attention on the threat to future global food security from the absence of pollution mitigation and the persistence of global warming.
Copyright and License
© 2022. The Authors. Earth's Future published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Geophysical Union.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Acknowledgement
Y.W. acknowledges the support of NSF (AGS-2103714). L.H. acknowledges the fellowship supported by the Resnick Sustainability Institute at California Institute of Technology. Y.W., J.L., C.F., J.H.J. and Y.L.Y. acknowledge the support of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA. J.W. and Z.L. acknowledge the NASA Applied Science program (number: 80NSSC21K1980). We thank Drs. Xu Yue and Chao Liu for helpful discussions. All correspondence and requests for materials in this paper should be addressed to Y.W (yuanwang@purdue.edu).
Contributions
Conceptualization: Yuan Wang. Data curation: Liyin He, Jing Wei. Formal analysis: Liyin He, Jing Wei, Yuan Wang, Quanbiao Shang, Junjie Liu, Yi Yin, Christian Frankenberg, Zhanqing Li, Yuk L. Yung. Investigation: Liyin He, Jing Wei, Yuan Wang Methodology: Liyin He, Yuan Wang. Project Administration: Yuan Wang. Resources: Liyin He, Jing Wei, Yuan Wang. Supervision: Yuan Wang. Validation: Yuan Wang. Visualization: Liyin He, Yuan Wang. Writing – original draft: Liyin He, Yuan Wang. Writing – review & editing: Liyin He, Jing Wei, Yuan Wang, Quanbiao Shang, Junjie Liu, Yi Yin, Christian Frankenberg, Jonathan H. Jiang, Zhanqing Li, Yuk L. Yung.
Data Availability
The monthly temperature and precipitation products used in this study are publicly available at Copernicus Climate Change Service (https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp%23%21/dataset/reanalysis%2Dera5%2Dsingle%2Dlevels%2Dmonthly%2Dmeans%3Ftab%3Dform). The monthly aerosol optical depth (AOD) reanalysis product is available at Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/datasets/M2TMNXAER_5.12.4/summary). The monthly surface ozone data set is from the ChinaHighAirPollutants (CHAP) data set (https://zenodo.org/record/5765588#.Yo60MJPMK3I). The Spatial Production Allocation Model crop spatial distribution is available at https://s3.amazonaws.com/mapspam/2010/v2.0/geotiff/spam2010v2r0_global_phys_area.geotiff.zip. The annual province-level crop statistics are from National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBSC) (https://data.stats.gov.cn/english/adv.htm?cn=C01). NBCS requires registration to obtain a free account, then annual statistics report can be found in the search bar and downloaded as CSV files. The processed data used in this study and the code of our statistical models can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7232790.
Supplemental Material
Supporting Information S1 (DOCX)
Files
Earth s Future - 2022 - He - Marked Impacts of Pollution Mitigation on Crop Yields in China.pdf
Files
(4.4 MB)
| Name | Size | Download all |
|---|---|---|
|
md5:eb9a598fb4518355f81623c48a93da92
|
1.6 MB | Download |
|
md5:73f2b6fbca05620e54a757fda0ad17fc
|
2.9 MB | Preview Download |
Additional details
Funding
- National Science Foundation
- AGS-2103714
- Resnick Sustainability Institute
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80NSSC21K1980
Dates
- Accepted
-
2022-10-16Accepted
- Accepted
-
2022-10-27Accepted manuscript online
- Available
-
2022-11-03Version of Record online