Connors and Janetos Author Book Chapter on Impacts of Potential Regional Crop Failures on Global Land Use

John Patrick Casellas Connors, an Assistant Professor of Geography at Texas A&M University and a Pardee Center post-doctoral associate from 2015-2018, is the lead author of a chapter in a new book titled Extreme Events and Climate Change: A Multidisciplinary Approach. The chapter, titled “Agricultural Losses in a Telecoupled World,” was posthumously co-authored by Prof. Anthony Janetos, Director of the Pardee Center from 2013-2019, as well as Yasmin Romitti, a PhD candidate in Boston University’s Department of Earth and Environment.

In the chapter, the authors used an integrated assessment model — the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) — to explore the impacts of potential shocks to the productivity of the world’s three major cereal crops: rice, wheat, and maize. They demonstrated how shocks in one location may impact land use and greenhouse gas emissions in distant areas of the world, and traced how the cascading effects of potential shocks will shape (and be shaped by) future climate change mitigation strategies.

The book, edited by Federico Castillo, Michael Wehner, and Dáithí A. Stone, is described as “an authoritative volume focusing on multidisciplinary methods to estimate the impacts of climate-related extreme events to society,” exploring topics “in fields such as hazard and risk analysis, climate change, atmospheric and ocean sciences, hydrology, geography, agricultural science, and environmental and space science.”