Dr Cammarano is a Professor of Environmental Crop Science at Aarhus University (Denmark). He graduated in Agricultural Science and Technology from the University of Basilicata (Italy), obtained a PhD at the University of Melbourne (Australia) and worked in the USA and the UK. His scientific expertise includes precision agriculture, agronomy, application and development of crop models, remote sensing, crop and soil sciences, climate change and climate forecasts in agriculture, understanding the role of agriculture in local and global food safety and security.
He has been also active in other international activities. He has been involved in the Agricultural Modeling Intercomparison Project (AgMIP) since its beginning where he worked on the wheat modeling improvement team, and to quantify the impacts of climate change on poverty rates in Southern Africa. He has also been involved in MACSUR (Modelling European Agriculture with Climate Change for Food Security), am European effort to model the impacts of Climate Change in Agriculture. He had conducted on-farm experiments with the aim of quantifying, understanding the cause that leads to the in-field spatial variability of crop growth and how to manage it. He is an Associate Chief Editor of the European Journal of Agronomy, and on the Editorial Board of Precision Agriculture, Crop and Pasture Science, and Italian Journal of Agronomy.
AbstractThe projected decline of processing tomato production due to climate change
Most climate change impact studies using crop growth models have been focused on wheat, maize, rice, and soybean, while fruits and vegetable have not received enough attention. Tomato is among the most important vegetables and ranks second only to potatoes by cultivated area, production, yield, commercial use, and consumption. Processing tomatoes are used for tomato paste, tomato sauce, ketchup and other tomato-based products. Their production is concentrated in ten major “tomato baskets” around world and three of those (USA, Italy and China) account for 65% of the global production.
A current scientific gap is the lack of an up-to-date biophysical assessment of the potential impact of climate change in these three countries using the latest climate projections (CMIP6) and a protocol that makes the results comparable with the results from other global efforts (e.g. AgMIP, MACSUR).
The crop model used to simulate field-grown processing tomato is Cropping System Model (CSM)-CROPGRO-Tomato that is included in the DSSAT, V4.7. The model has been calibrated for tomato genotypes in different environments using published scientific literature and validated at regional level using the data from the World Processing Tomato Industry for the period 2005-2019.
Five bias-adjusted Global Climate Models (GCMs) produced at 0.5° x 0.5° daily resolution by the Inter-Sectoral Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) based on the CMIP6 were used. In addition, the crop model was run with three Shared Socioeconomic Pathway and Representative Concentration Pathway (SSP-RCP) scenarios: low (SSP1-2.6), high (SSP3-7.0), and very high (SSP5-8.5) greenhouse emissions and related socio-economic conditions and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Simulation results showed that processing tomato production in the three main producing countries decrease by 2050 under the ensemble of projected climate scenarios (the uncertainty range is due to the 5 GCMs projections), with minor changes for SSP1-2.6 (+0.2 to -9.9%) and more severe losses under SSP3-7.0 (+8.6 to -8.6%) and SSP5-8.5 (+6.5 to -15.2%). The amount of water required for irrigation increased by 5 to 50%, depending on the region. In China the projected water requirements is projected to be lower comparted to California and Italy, suggesting that China has a potential to become one of the important regions for processing tomato production by 2050 to become one of the main processing tomato production hubs. This is because projected temperature increase tends to minimize the beneficial effect of higher carbon dioxide concentrations. In fact, the increase in air temperature causes an increase in irrigation required to meet the crop’s water demand, lowering the efficiency of irrigation. Projected water demand for irrigation might strain future water resources, which is critical in locations such as southern California and Italy. Future work includes additional political and socio-economic information to be integrated in similar studies to assess changes in the whole system to evaluate shifts in the value chain including processing plants and transportation lines that may be anticipated.