Climate and livelihoods in rural Ningxia: Final report

The project Impacts of Climate Change on Chinese Agriculture (ICCCA) was funded by the UK Government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra – transferred to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, DECC, in October 2008) and Department for International Development (DFID), conducted in partnership with China's Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST). Since 2001, the project has led the way in understanding how climate change can be expected to affect rural China. The project was rolled out in two phases: Phase I (2001 to 2004) applied regional climate modelling to construct several possible future climate scenarios for China. These were subsequently fed into a suite of regional crop models adapted by the Institute of Environment and Sustainable Development in  Agriculture (previously the Agrometeorology Institute) of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), in collaboration with UK climate-change researchers, to determine the potential impacts of climate change on crop yields in China up to 2100. Building on Phase I, Phase II (2005 to 2008) refined and widened the national level analysis. CAAS also worked in collaboration with major regional implementers such as the Clean Development Mechanism Service Centre (Ningxia) and Meteorological Study Institute (Ningxia), and engaged a range of stakeholders to assess the impact of climate change on rural livelihoods. This led to the development of the first regional adaptation framework in China – for the northern province of Ningxia.