Towards a New Agriculture for the Climate Change Era in West Asia, Iran

Abstract

Climate change means a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods. It will potentially lead to such eventualities as drought and famine, which some of the CWANA countries have already experienced. The capacity of national governments and communities to mitigate disasters will be limited in the short to medium term, rendering them still vulnerable to the adversities of climate change. Climate change is a global issue with regional implications. Many multilateral environmental agreements address these issues, and some countries of the region have ratified some such agreements (CWANA, 2009). Effects of climate change on land use refers to both how land use might be altered by climate change and what land management strategies would mitigate the negative effects of climate change (Dale, 1997). Asia is the most populous continent, population in 2002 was reported to be about 3,902 million, of which almost 61% is rural and 38.5% lives within 100 km of the coast (Duedall & Maul, 2005). Asia is divided into seven subregions, namely North Asia, Central Asia, West Asia, Tibetan Plateau, East Asia, South Asia and South-East Asia. All of Asia is very likely to warm during this century; the warming is likely to be well above the global mean in central Asia, the Tibetan Plateau and northern Asia, above the global mean in East and South Asia, and similar to the global mean in Southeast Asia. Extreme weather events in Asia were reported to provide evidence of increases in the intensity or frequency on regional scales throughout the 20th century. More investigations predicted that the area-averaged annual mean warming would be about 3°C in the decade of the 2050s and about 5°C in the decade of the 2080s over the land regions of Asia as a result of future increases in atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases (Lal et al., 2001). In addition rainfall will be altered too. Rainfall in the Philippines would continue to be highly variable, as influenced by seasonal changes and climate extremes and be of higher intensity (Perez, 2008). Also, Changes in annual precipitation for Singapore would range from –2 to +15% with a median of +7%. Extreme rainfall and winds associated with tropical cyclones are likely to increase (Ho, 2008). Other investigations for west Asia has reported that long-term climatic changes of annual surface air temperature, surface wind and rainfall of the State of Qatar, Sultanate of Oman and the United Arab Emirates revealed that significant climate warming is taking place in entire three countries. However, there is no notable trend observed in the rainfall series at any of these places. There is a significant decrease in the mean wind speed at many locations in the region of investigation. The 18