GIS-Based Climate Change Adaptation Decision Support Tool (ADST): Indices to Assess Agricultural Vulnerability

There is a need to address the issue of how climate change and water resource and agricultural impacts assessment can be transformed into useful information for use by agricultural decision-makers to reduce climatic risk in agricultural production and explore approaches to bridge the gap between the assessment process and decision-making endpoints. A GIS-based Climate Change Adaptation Decision Support Tool (ADST) can help agriculture decision-makers in considering climate change adaptation in future plans and strategies. This tool builds up a few GIS databases covering key climate-water-agriculture information under current and future climate (2050s) along with a list of agricultural adaptation options. For the case study area - Ningxia, China - a series of ADST indices were computed for describing agro-climatic vulnerability, agricultural adaptive capacity and an agricultural investment plan. The approach to developing the vulnerability maps is based on the IPCC definition of vulnerability as a function of adaptive capacity, sensitivity, and exposure. Indices of adaptive capacity, climate and non-climatic sensitivity, and climate change exposure were constructed to examine the vulnerability to climate change in the region. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method is used to prioritize indicators to assess the potential contributions of various aspects to systems' coping capacities. Adaptive capacity for agriculture is considered to be an outcome of biophysical, socio-economic, and technological factors. Climate exposure is determined through the use of scenario results from the Hadley Center's PRECIS regional climate model and Environment Canada's scenarios network (CCCSN).