Climate Change Impacts for the Conterminous USA

In this volume, an improved Integrated Assessment methodology is used to analyze climate change impacts on agriculture, water resources, unmanaged ecosystems, irrigation, and land use in the United States and the economic implications of these impacts. This book contains a series of papers documenting the methods, models, analysis, and results of this integrated assessment for a wide-ranging set of scenarios describing future climate change.

Innovations described include the integration of water resource and agricultural modeling and the refinement of an agriculture and land-use economics model to incorporate results from process-level ecosystem models of agriculture, water, and natural ecosystem resources. Scenarios selected for this study address a range of uncertainties associated with choice of climate model, presence or absence of a ‘CO₂-fertilization effect’, impacts on international trade in agricultural commodities, and their consequences for producers and consumers.

Reprinted from Climatic Change, Vol. 69, No. 1, 2005