Estimation of climate change effects on rainfed Maize production in southern Ethiopia

A developing country like Ethiopia suffers immensely from the effects of climate change due to its limited economic capability to build irrigation projects to combat climate change impacts on crop production. This study evaluated the impact of climate change on rainfed maize production in the southern part of Ethiopia. The Aqua Crop model was employed to assess potential rainfed maize production in the study area with and without climate change. The latest version of the stochastic weather generator model LARS-WG was used to simulate local-scale level climate variables based on low-resolution GCM outputs. The expected monthly percentage change of rainfall during two-time horizons (2040 and 2060) ranged from -23.18 to 20.23% (2031–2050) and -14.8 to 36.66% (2051–2070). Moreover, the monthly mean of the minimum and maximum temperature were estimated to increase in the range of 1.296 to 2.192 °C and 0.98 to 1.84 °C for the first time horizon (2031–2050) and from 1.86 to 3.4 °C and 1.56 to 3.18 °C in the second time horizon (2051–2070), respectively. Maize yields were expected to increase with a range of 4.13 to 7% and 6.36 to 9.32% for the respective time horizons in the study area provided that all other parameters were kept the same.