Agricultural Decision-Making in Indonesia with ENSO Variability: Integrating Climate Science, Risk Assessment, and Policy Analysis

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

This Human and Social Dynamics Priority Area project involves an interdisciplinary research approach to informing agricultural decision-making in the face of climate-related uncertainty. The research will focus on Indonesia, where agricultural production is strongly influenced by the annual cycle of precipitation and by year-to-year variations in the annual cycle caused by El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) dynamics. The project will use a combination of general circulation model experiments and downscaling models to assess the influence of global warming on the annual climate cycle and on ENSO-induced changes in precipitation and agricultural production in Indonesia. These model experiments will result in a set of regional climate scenarios for Indonesia in the mid-21st century that will be used for decision analysis. Projected crop production and production uncertainty will be derived from the climate scenarios using regression analysis. A risk assessment framework will then be developed to link the probabilities of climate change to its potential consequences, and to show how adaptation measures, such as the development of drought tolerant crop varieties and irrigation investment, could alter the magnitude of potential damages. The two main goals of the research are: i) to project the impacts of global warming on Indonesian agriculture by means of changes in mean climate and climate variability (i.e., ENSO); and ii) to analyze how these projections (including relevant bands of uncertainty) can be used to inform agricultural decision-making processes. The intellectual merit of this project is based on its interdisciplinary and integrated design: to date, climate models have been developed with little knowledge of agricultural system dynamics, and agricultural policy analysis has been conducted with little knowledge of climate dynamics. The educational merit of the project is based on the training of students from interdisciplinary and disciplinary graduate programs at all of the participating universities and the development of teaching models. The practical merit of the project stems from the fact that the combined forces of ENSO and global warming are likely to have dramatic, and currently unforeseen, effects on agricultural production and food security in Indonesia and other tropical countries. Once the model template is designed, validated, and used in Indonesia, it can be applied to other tropical agricultural countries.