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There have been increasing concerns on risks and uncertainty posed by climate change to China's future crop production. The existing assessments using popular process-based and site-specific crop growing models highlight the significant extent of climate-induced yield reduction, and thus suggest a scary downward risk for China's future food production. Surprisingly, much less attention has been paid to exploring the potential gains that may also be brought by climate change. To address this imbalance, we develop an integrated agro-climatic and ecological assessment tool that is capable of detecting the shifts of multicropping opportunities under different climate change scenarios. The application of this tool to the context of China reveals significant extension of multicropping opportunities brought in by climate change. We argue for an active adaptation to such emerging opportunities through both market and policy incentives, because the aggregate gain of such adaptation is sufficient to outweigh the loss as revealed by the existing assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study establishes a procedure to couple Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) and China Agroecological Zone model (AEZ-China). This procedure enables us to quantify the effects of two natural adaptation measures on soybean production in China, concern on which has been growing owing to the rapidly rising demand for soybean and the foreseen global climate change. The parameters calibration and mode verification are based on the observation records of soybean growth at 13 agro-meteorological observation stations in Northeast China and Huang-Huai-Hai Plain over 1981–2011. The calibration of eco-physiological parameters is based on the algorithms of DSSAT that simulate the dynamic bio-physiological processes of crop growth in daily time-step. The effects of shifts in planting day and changes in the length of growth cycle (LGC) are evaluated by the speedy algorithms of AEZ. Results indicate that without adaptation, climate change from the baseline 1961–1990 to the climate of 2050s as specified in the Providing Regional Climate for Impacts Studies-A1B would decrease the potential yield of soybean. By contrast, simulations of DSSAT using AEZ-recommended cultivars with adaptive LGC and also the corresponding adaptive planting dates show that the risk of yield loss could be fully or partially mitigated across majority of grid cells in the major soybean-growing areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]