XXI century challenges in Climate Change opportunities and constrains for the Russian Federation agriculture
Ivan I. Vasenev
Russian Timiryazev State Agrarian University, Moscow, Russia
While globally projected climate changes will result in most crop yields general decline (up to 20%, IPCC 2014), Russia will benefit from temperature warming due to an increasing of growing season length and generally more mild climate conditions, including predicted enhancement of precipitation (Valentini, Vasenev, 2015).
Characteristic for the RF southern taiga zone in XXI first decades accelerated annual temperature growth is almost in 3 times higher than mean planetary one (Vilfand, 2017). Together with essentially increased precipitation values this resulted in 2 record years for grain crops total harvest in 2016 and 2017. Grain export growth and more favorable agroclimate conditions gradually improve RF farming profitability and sustainability. Growing RF agricultural potential will be strengthened due to arable land area increasing in case of previously abandoned farms and profitable farming development in new intensive agricultural regions with favorable agroecological conditions – especially in the east and north parts of Russia.
However, despite these favorable circumstances further sustainable development of RF agriculture requires land current and predicted state agroecological assessment, climate-smart agricultural land-use design using new crop varieties and agrotechnologies – best adapted to local agrolandscape and agroclimate conditions. Increased temperature and precipitation are favorable not only for crops but their pests, weeds and pathogens too that already resulted in the fusariose fast expanding in 2016.
To be able to solve the new agroecological problems and to use the new land agroecological potentials we need the adapted to concreate regions of Russia smart agroecological monitoring and decision support systems (Vasenev e.a., 2017) as combination of climate, soil, crop and land-use models to help land-users in implementation of agriculture best practices.