法国LSCE实验室生态研究博士后岗位

Institution

Laboratoire des Science du Climat et de l'Environnement (http://www.lsce.ipsl.fr)

Position

Postdoctoral position on modeling the adaptation of land use to climate change for major agrosystems

Location

Paris (France)

Date Posted

Sep 25 2007

Description

An important issue for the future is to estimate whether Food Production will be jeopardized by climate change and whether modelling can help choose the most adapted type of agrosystems per region .
Three important questions (among others) will be addressed:

1/ How will the yield change regionally, globally, and per crop type ?
2/ What consequences the climate and yield changes will have on the economical sectors?
3/ What land cover change can we propose to minimize the economical damage and the impact on the environment, while maximising food production?

To address these questions we have launched a project: AUTREMENT (http://autrement.lsce.ipsl.fr) sponsored by the French national research agency (ANR). AUTREMENT first aims to evaluate the impact of the climatic changes expected for the 21st century on the various sectors of agriculture at both the regional and global scales. Special emphasis will be put, at the regional level, on Europe and West Africa where we already have some expertise. Climate scenarios previously run for the last IPCC report will be used for this evaluation.

The final objective of our project is to propose some land use and land-cover changes that will minimize the economic and environmental impacts while maximising productivity. This work will be based on a modelling approach that will couple our terrestrial ecosystem model ORCHIDEE to the economical model NEXUS.

The proposed postdoctoral position is opened for 18 months, with a possible extension. It will mainly focus on the first part of the project, i.e. the quantification of the responses of crops, managed grassland and forests to the projected climate changes, and to proposed land-use/land-cover adaptations. The post-doc will therefore mainly work with our advanced modelling framework ORCHIDEE .
Three main steps are foreseen:

(1) Run and thoroughly analyse a set of impact simulations forced with (to start with) 2 contrasted IPCC climate scenarios of the 21st century (that have been run with actual land use). The gravity of the impact will result from the analysis of both biophysical and biogeochemical changes, such as for example yield, potential of carbon storage and vulnerability of the water resources.

(2) The projected yields will be used by the CIRED team to force the NEXUS model. Nexus will estimate an optimum reallocation of the arable land, and therefore provides us with new land cover and land use maps. A second set of impact simulations will therefore be run forced with the same set of climate scenarios as in (1) but with the updated land cover/land use maps. Simulations carried out within (1) and (2) will be compared both in terms of e.g. yield, water resources, carbon storage, ..., to diagnose the feedbacks of the economic system on the resources of the soil/plant system.

(3) If the changes in biophysical and biogeochemical properties of the land, diagnosed in (2), are large enough to have a potential feedback on the future trajectory of climate,
we will run another climate scenario of the 21st century that will include the predicted land-cover changes.

The work will be carried out at the LSCE in the biosphere modelling team with Nathalie de Noblet, Philippe Ciais, Nicolas Viovy, Pierre Friedlingstein and Sonke Zaehle in frequent interactions with economists at CIRED Renaud Crassous and Vincent Gitz.

Salary includes full social and health benefits.

Contact

Applications including CV, letter of motivation and the names of two reference persons
Should be sent to, Nicolas Viovy (nicolas.viovy@cea.fr) and Nathalie de Noblet (Nathalie.de-noblet@cea.fr)