Exploring the environmental performance of agricultural land planning scenarios over time in a context of climate change

Agricultural areas are faced with the dual challenge of reducing their environmental impacts while adapting to climate change. Adaptations rely on strategies such as irrigation or cultivated crop diversification, whose environmental performance over time is affected by climate change. Such environmental performance can be studied by combining Territorial Life Cycle Assessment (T-LCA) with crop modeling. However, the identification of optimal planning scenarios within the multiplicity of adaptation possibilities that could be assessed hinder the use of classical scenario analyses that could be costly in computing time and not rigorous enough to cover every scenario. Therefore, a methodology coupling experimental design with T-LCA and crop modeling is conceived to investigate the environmental performance of various agricultural planning scenarios in a climate change context. The usefulness of this methodology is proven through a theoretical case study of an agricultural territory using different crop combinations, with or without irrigation, within the context of the worst-case IPCC scenario of climate change (SSP5-8.5). Environmental performance is quantified with eco-efficiency. Eco-efficiency means values and variabilities are calculated over the next 30 years to identify scenarios maintaining highest performance over time. The proposed innovative coupling enables a full investigation of the environmental performance of agricultural land management scenarios integrating different modalities. This study demonstrates that under low interannual variability of fertilisation practices, irrigation and crop diversity contribute to the stabilisation of environmental performance related to the impacts on climate change. Further developments are required for a more robust modelling of agro-ecosystem functioning for application to real-world cases.