An uncertain future? Major agricultural changes required to mitigate phosphorus losses under climate change

We have just published in Nature Communications a sobering reminder about the prospects of phosphorus transfer from land to water in the future under climate change.  Mary Ockenden, my Post Doctoral research fellow, skillfully led the paper and the abstract of the paper follows, with a link to the open access version of the paper here and a PDF here.

Phosphorus losses from land to water will be impacted by climate change and land management for food production, with detrimental impacts on aquatic ecosystems. Here we use a unique combination of methods to evaluate the impact of projected climate change on future phosphorus transfers, and to assess what scale of agricultural change would be needed to mitigate these transfers. We combine novel high-frequency phosphorus flux data from three representative catchments across the UK, a new high-spatial resolution climate model, uncertainty estimates from an ensemble of future climate simulations, two phosphorus transfer models of contrasting complexity and a simplified representation of the potential intensification of agriculture based on expert elicitation from land managers. We show that the effect of climate change on average winter phosphorus loads (predicted increase up to 30% by 2050s) will be limited only by large-scale agricultural changes (e.g., 20–80% reduction in phosphorus inputs).

Our press team did a good job in promoting the story with this simple short video and we achieved National BBC Radio 4 attention on Farming Today as well as other channels.  

This work reflects the importance of the long term data from the National Defra Demonstration Test Catchments and the NERC NUTCAT projects, all coming together. The more you think about thsi work and its implications, the more serious are the implications.  This is just the beginning...... 

Phil

Long term phosphorus in the Thames, Maumee and Yangtze rivers basins

Thanks to Matt Scholtz from the US EPA Sustainable Phosphorus Alliance, here is a video talking head summary of our recent paper on long term in Nature Geosciences.   The doi of the paper is doi:10.1038/ngeo2693 and you can click on this for a link.  The take home point from this reminds us of the slow speed that P moves through the land water system.

 

Thanks to Danilo

Danilo Almeida had spent the last 12 months working with the team in the lab on organic phosphorus mobilisation in soils. Danilo is completing his PhD on the effect of tropical grasses on soil phosphorus availability to soybean, in collaboration with São Paulo State University, Brazil. It's been a pleasure to work with you Danilo. Dan left me a bottle of Cachaca - so it looks like a summer of Caipirinha cocktails!  

Thank-you 

Phil