Impacts of climate mitigation and supplementary irrigation on crop yields in Africa

Journal article

Africa is facing an increasingly severe food crisis. Due to the lack of infrastructure and limited agricultural water conservancy investment, impacts of future climate change on agricultural yields are particularly pronounced in African countries. In this study, based on the ensemble-mean output of the dynamical crop growth model LPJmL driven by five bias-corrected general circulation models (GCMs) (MRI-ESM2-0, IPSL-CM6A-LR, MPI-ESM1-2-HR, UKESM1-0-LL, GFDL-ESM4) in the ISIMIP3 dataset, we investigate yield changes of four main crops (maize, rice, soybean and wheat) in Africa under three socioeconomic and emission scenarios and investigate the potential of supplemental irrigation on crop yield increases. We find that the implementation of climate mitigation actions reducing high carbon emission into low levels are expected to have very different impacts throughout the whole of Africa, with some countries gaining considerably while others may be faced with a worse set of circumstances than would be the case under a historical scenario. Unlike climate mitigation measures, supplemental irrigation shows consistent positive effects on crop yields across all African countries.

Authors: Zhao, L; Zhang, Z; Kobe, FT; Crabbe, MJC

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Open Geosciences
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 1
• Article number: 20250892
• Publication date: 2026-01-29
• Acceptance date: 2025-09-10
• DOI: 10.1515/geo-2025-0892
• EISSN: 2391-5447
• Language: English
• Keywords: supplemental irrigation; crop yield; Africa; climate mitigation