Regional Grain Yield Response to Climate Change in China: A Statistic Modeling Approach

China is the world's most populous country with only 7% of the world's arable land. Accurate assessment of the effect that future climate change may pose on grain production is essential to the sustainability of agriculture. Model variations plus uncertainties in the future climate change scenarios create a big challenge for such evaluation. In this work, we developed the statistical models for six different regions in China, using the historical yield data between 1981 and 2010 from the National Bureau of Statistics combined with meteorological station observations and analyzed the impact of climate variation (i.e., temperature and precipitation changes) on the grain yields into the 2030s, based on 28 ensemble climate predictions from six state-of-the-art Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) model outputs. Our results indicate that the four crops (i.e., rice, maize, wheat, and soybean) respond similarly to the climate variation in different regions of China, with the sensitivity to warming increasing from north to south and from inner land to coast regions. In addition, the yields of all the four crops in East and Central-South China are also positively correlated with precipitation change. Future projections with a medium greenhouse gas mitigation scenario (RCP4.5) showed that the yield of the four crops in six regions of China would increase ranging from 0.02 to 1.19 hundred ton/ha, in 2030s with respect to the 2000s. Nevertheless, adaptive implementations such as appropriately improve the irrigation infrastructure in East and Central-South China could mitigate the adverse impact from future climate change.