Detection and awareness of increasing climate variability and the elevating climate risk: Multiple cropping

Abstract

All socio-economic systems (especially climate-dependent systems such as agriculture, pastoralism, forestry, water resources, and human health) are continually in a state of flux in response to changing circumstances, including climatic conditions. Detection evidence and awareness evidence show that there is considerable potential for adaptation to reduce the impacts of climate change and to realize new opportunities. In China's Yangtze Valley, eighteenth-century regional expansions and contractions on the double cropping system for rice represented adaptive responses to the frequency of production successes and production failures associated with climatic variations (IPCC 2001). Change in climate risk patterns may include change in temperature, wind pattern, precipitation as well as change in frequency and magnitude of climate variability, particularly the extreme climate events (e.g. Stigter et al. 2005) © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.