The Climate System Analysis Group (CSAG) and the African Climate and Development Initiative (ACDI) will co-investigate the impact of solar radiation management (SRM) on agricultural production over southern Africa through the lens of extreme weather events (such as drought, heat waves and heavy rainfall) and their large-scale drivers, including the dynamic and thermodynamic components of regional rainfall, and will attribute changes in risk to this production due to SRM. Firstly, the potential impact of SRM on crop suitability and yield in southern Africa will be quantified using a crop suitability and crop yield model. Secondly, these results will then be contextualized within large-scale atmospheric drivers such as the Hadley circulation and/or the sub-tropical jet stream. Thirdly, we will analyse how SRM affects rainfall extremes through partitioning the thermodynamic and dynamic components of rainfall as these determine the large-scale and synoptic environments that impact regional agricultural production. Lastly, we will assess whether deploying SRM in a high emission scenario would reduce the risk to crop suitability and yield in comparison to a world with low emissions and no SRM using attribution methods.is study will quantify the impact of solar radiation management (SRM) on agricultural production through an analysis of the large-scale, prognostic drivers of extreme weather events over southern Africa.

Time frames: 2021

Funder: UNESCO

For further details contact : Chris Lennard, Izidine Pinto, Temitope Egbebiyi