The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has upgraded its innovative ABC-Map geospatial app with a new indicator which shows that several major crops including wheat, coffee, beans, cassava, and plantain could lose half their best or optimally suitable land by 2100.
Designed for policymakers, technicians, and project designers, the Adaptation, Biodiversity and Carbon Mapping Tool ("ABC-Map") offers an initial screening of the climate-related risks, essential biodiversity indicators, and the carbon reduction potential of a selected project. It is an open-source satellite imagery app, based on Google Earth Engine, with information from global datasets.
Following its upgrade, ABC Map now features a new indicator, providing information on the suitability of major crops in evolving climate scenarios to the end of the century. FAO Senior Natural Resources (Climate Change) Officer Martial Bernoux says the new information could help ensure our capacity to cope with climate change and its impacts in the long term.
"Given the increasingly erratic weather and extreme events, including droughts, extreme heat and floods, farmers, policymakers, and technicians need to know if the crops, investments or projects they are considering will work or if they need to adjust and consider other crops or more adaptation measures instead," Bernoux says. "Our ABC-Map tool can now better assist them with these considerations, further reinforcing climate resilience."
Concerning data
The new indicator, developed by FAO, incorporates data from a study by French fintech start-up Finres, commissioned by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and funded by the French Development Agency (AFD). The study, "Have crops already reached peak suitability: assessing global climatic suitability decreases for crop cultivation", uses a new method to assess crop suitability in varied climate scenarios. It concludes that five out of nine major staple and cash crops-including wheat, coffee, beans, cassava, and plantain-are already losing optimal growing conditions, and some could lose half their optimal suitable land by 2100.
In particular, the study's researchers suggest that coffee production in some of the major coffee-growing regionscould decline sharply by 2100. They say beans and wheat could experience significant losses, especially in regions such as North America and Europe. Maize and rice, however, could initially find more suitable areas for cultivation, the researchers suggest, but this situation could reverse by the end of the century under high-emission scenarios.
How does it work?
The ABC-Map geospatial app features indicators in three sections: adaptation, biodiversity, and carbon. This new indicator expands the scope of the adaptation section, which previously displayed only information on past trends in a given area, including past temperature and rainfall. Now, the new indicator also adds information on future trends.
A user inputs a location, then selects a crop from 30 options, including coffee, maize and wheat. The tool then displays the suitability of the selected crops in that area, for time periods stretching to 2100, providing a crop suitability score for two different climate emission scenarios. Also planned for this year is an indicator with information on livestock heat stress and another for crop water requirements, which would estimate expected rainfall and potential irrigation needs.
Strengthening national capacity
ABC-Map, launched in 2024, is one of the technical tools in the COP28 Agriculture, Food and Climate National Action Toolkit, helping governments to develop and implement policy measures on climate action and agrifood system transformation. It was launched last year during an expert panel on the Food and Agriculture for Sustainable Transformation (FAST) Partnership, at the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture in Berlin, Germany.
The tool helps users better understand the synergies and trade-offs among the three pressing and interlinked challenges of climate change mitigation, adaptation and countering biodiversity loss in the context of safeguarding agriculture and food security. It promotes holistic environmental actions in agriculture and with its latest upgrade, ABC-Map will further boost FAO's support to countries to fulfill their obligations under the three Rio Conventions and strengthen their capacity to assess and confront climate related shocks and impacts.
