Start Date
9-5-2022 3:45 PM
End Date
9-5-2022 5:00 PM
Access Type
Open Access
Abstract
There is an increasing focus on reducing agricultural GHG emissions, while also facilitating cropping systems’ adaptation to climate change. Much of this combined agriculture mitigation and adaptation work centers on managed soils’ carbon and nutrient processes, and interactions with water. I will present two on-going projects evaluating agricultural soil-water-crop interactions and discuss implications for climate mitigation and/or adaptation. I will first describe new, on-going work using an integrated climate-crop modeling framework to Asia. Preliminary results suggest that while specific combinations of management options, including conservation water and soil management, can provide mitigation and adaptation benefits, several trade-offs may exist between yield, GHG reductions, water use efficiency and other key biophysical dimensions.
Furthermore, some socio-economic dimensions, e.g. on-farm labor availability, are still largely under-explored but may serve as important constraints on the adoption and scaling of alternative management. I will then zoom out to the global scale to briefly overview recent work quantifying how large-scale soil degradation on managed lands may impact climate adaptation in major agricultural areas via changes in soil water holding capacity. In doing so, I will highlight why new approaches to soil and water management are critical to agricultural mitigation and adaptation goals, and consider major research needs, uncertainties, and ways forward to address them from a modeling perspective.
Biography
Sonali McDermid is an Associate Professor and climate scientist in the Dept. of Environmental Studies at NYU. Her research focuses on understanding both climate change impacts on agriculture and food security, and the impacts of agriculture on the environment. She is a Climate Co-Lead for the Agricultural Intercomparison and Improvement Project, evaluating climate model to understand land-atmosphere interactions and the impacts of LCLUC forcing on the climate system. McDermid is a recent Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2021) and Fulbright-Kalam Fellow awardee (2020), which supports her work looking at the intersection of climate mitigation and adaptation in agriculture. She holds a B.A. in Physics from NYU, and a Masters and Ph.D. from the Dept. of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, focusing on Atmospheric Science and Climatology. Prior to NYU, she was NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in NYC.
Additional Links
ORCID
More crops, less drops? Agriculture and climate interactions via soils
There is an increasing focus on reducing agricultural GHG emissions, while also facilitating cropping systems’ adaptation to climate change. Much of this combined agriculture mitigation and adaptation work centers on managed soils’ carbon and nutrient processes, and interactions with water. I will present two on-going projects evaluating agricultural soil-water-crop interactions and discuss implications for climate mitigation and/or adaptation. I will first describe new, on-going work using an integrated climate-crop modeling framework to Asia. Preliminary results suggest that while specific combinations of management options, including conservation water and soil management, can provide mitigation and adaptation benefits, several trade-offs may exist between yield, GHG reductions, water use efficiency and other key biophysical dimensions.
Furthermore, some socio-economic dimensions, e.g. on-farm labor availability, are still largely under-explored but may serve as important constraints on the adoption and scaling of alternative management. I will then zoom out to the global scale to briefly overview recent work quantifying how large-scale soil degradation on managed lands may impact climate adaptation in major agricultural areas via changes in soil water holding capacity. In doing so, I will highlight why new approaches to soil and water management are critical to agricultural mitigation and adaptation goals, and consider major research needs, uncertainties, and ways forward to address them from a modeling perspective.