ABSTRACT

This problem was also recognized by the Russian government, which included mitigation of climate change on agriculture in its program for the agroindustrial complex development in the period up to 2010. The Ministry of Agriculture also provided some qualitative assessments. However, quantitative predictions of climate change impact on Russian agriculture are scarce. From the late 1970s, the All-Russian Research Institute of Agricultural Meteorology* began developing a set of models "WeatherAgriculture" (e.g., Sirotenho et al. 1997) and produced predictions of future change in yield of the main crops in Russia. According to Sirotenko, the expected climate change will lead to 15% decrease in grain production for the whole country. With C 02 fertilization taken into account, the decrease would be only 2%, but combined with the effect of soil degradation, the cumulative effect would lead to a 16% yield drop. Another effect would increase the frequency of low-yield recurrence in the European part of the country, excluding the North. However, these predictions used older 1990 IPCC recommendations and Global Circulation Models (GCMs) and included only a limited number of crop varieties.