Climate change and its impact on agricultural production, with a focus on the Mediterranean area.

Climate change will impact and has already impacted a large range of physical/biological systems and sectors of the human activity, among them agriculture (including livestock) and its main output as food production. A large number of existing works allows to identify a reliable perspective on the predicted consequences for the various productions and the various regions, which may significantly differ from one to the another: they result from the combination of a large set of elementary components of the plant ecophysiology, including the stimulation of photosynthesis by the carbon dioxide. These diverse effects may vary from positive (by some 20%) in some temperate conditions to highly negative (down to 50% reductions) in warm conditions. This range may be encountered within the Mediterranean basin, but there is a general tendency to a worsening of climatic conditions, by the combination of warmer and drier conditions. More than in other geographic areas, water availability will be the major limiting factor. The agricultural sector will have to face this worsened future and to adopt a range of adaptive measures. The observed recent evolution, which appears similar to the long-term projections, gives a first perception of the necessary changes, but the near future is still rather uncertain about the velocity of climate change in the mid-term horizon (2030, for instance).