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    Diverging importance of drought stress for maize and winter wheat in Europe
    ([London] : Nature Publishing Group UK, 2018) Webber, Heidi; Ewert, Frank; Olesen, Jørgen E.; Müller, Christoph; Fronzek, Stefan; Ruane, Alex C.; Bourgault, Maryse; Martre, Pierre; Ababaei, Behnam; Bindi, Marco; Ferrise, Roberto; Finger, Robert; Fodor, Nándor; Gabaldón-Leal, Clara; Gaiser, Thomas; Jabloun, Mohamed; Kersebaum, Kurt-Christian; Lizaso, Jon I.; Lorite, Ignacio J.; Manceau, Loic; Moriondo, Marco; Nendel, Claas; Rodríguez, Alfredo; Ruiz-Ramos, Margarita; Semenov, Mikhail A.; Siebert, Stefan; Stella, Tommaso; Stratonovitch, Pierre; Trombi, Giacomo; Wallach, Daniel
    Understanding the drivers of yield levels under climate change is required to support adaptation planning and respond to changing production risks. This study uses an ensemble of crop models applied on a spatial grid to quantify the contributions of various climatic drivers to past yield variability in grain maize and winter wheat of European cropping systems (1984–2009) and drivers of climate change impacts to 2050. Results reveal that for the current genotypes and mix of irrigated and rainfed production, climate change would lead to yield losses for grain maize and gains for winter wheat. Across Europe, on average heat stress does not increase for either crop in rainfed systems, while drought stress intensifies for maize only. In low-yielding years, drought stress persists as the main driver of losses for both crops, with elevated CO2 offering no yield benefit in these years.
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    State-of-the-art global models underestimate impacts from climate extremes
    ([London] : Nature Publishing Group UK, 2019) Schewe, Jacob; Gosling, Simon N.; Reyer, Christopher; Zhao, Fang; Ciais, Philippe; Elliott, Joshua; Francois, Louis; Huber, Veronika; Lotze, Heike K.; Seneviratne, Sonia I.; van Vliet, Michelle T. H.; Vautard, Robert; Wada, Yoshihide; Breuer, Lutz; Büchner, Matthias; Carozza, David A.; Chang, Jinfeng; Coll, Marta; Deryng, Delphine; de Wit, Allard; Eddy, Tyler D.; Folberth, Christian; Frieler, Katja; Friend, Andrew D.; Gerten, Dieter; Gudmundsson, Lukas; Hanasaki, Naota; Ito, Akihiko; Khabarov, Nikolay; Kim, Hyungjun; Lawrence, Peter; Morfopoulos, Catherine; Müller, Christoph; Müller Schmied, Hannes; Orth, René; Ostberg, Sebastian; Pokhrel, Yadu; Pugh, Thomas A. M.; Sakurai, Gen; Satoh, Yusuke; Schmid, Erwin; Stacke, Tobias; Steenbeek, Jeroen; Steinkamp, Jörg; Tang, Qiuhong; Tian, Hanqin; Tittensor, Derek P.; Volkholz, Jan; Wang, Xuhui; Warszawski, Lila
    Global impact models represent process-level understanding of how natural and human systems may be affected by climate change. Their projections are used in integrated assessments of climate change. Here we test, for the first time, systematically across many important systems, how well such impact models capture the impacts of extreme climate conditions. Using the 2003 European heat wave and drought as a historical analogue for comparable events in the future, we find that a majority of models underestimate the extremeness of impacts in important sectors such as agriculture, terrestrial ecosystems, and heat-related human mortality, while impacts on water resources and hydropower are overestimated in some river basins; and the spread across models is often large. This has important implications for economic assessments of climate change impacts that rely on these models. It also means that societal risks from future extreme events may be greater than previously thought.