The Optimal Climate Intervention Scenario for Crop Production Varies by Nation

Abstract. Stratospheric aerosol intervention (SAI) is a proposed strategy to reduce the effects of anthropogenic climate change. As it would not directly counteract the increased forcing from CO₂, its impacts on national crop production need to be analyzed, as SAI regionally modifies variables such as surface temperature, precipitation, humidity, total solar radiation, diffuse radiation, ultraviolet radiation, and surface ozone. In this work, we analyze impacts to crop production by looking at output from 11 different SAI scenarios carried out with a fully coupled Earth System Model coupled to a crop model. Higher latitude nations tend to produce the most calories under unabated climate change, while midlatitude nations maximize calories under moderate temperature limitation, and equatorial nations prefer large levels of climate intervention to produce the most calories from crops. Our results highlight the challenges in defining “globally optimal” SAI strategies, even if such definitions are based on just one metric.