Climate change-driven agricultural frontiers and their ecosystem trade-offs in the hills of Nepal

Climate change will create warmer temperatures and greater precipitation in mountainous regions, making agriculture increasingly possible in these areas. To determine the potential of agricultural expansion, this paper approximated how much new land could become suitable for cropping maize, rice, wheat, millet, buckwheat, and barley in Nepal by 2041-2060 and 2081-2100 periods under climate change projection. Additionally, this paper estimates the potential environmental trade-offs of agricultural expansion in Nepal by evaluating how carbon stores, protected areas, tree cover, and river systems would be traded for agriculture. Results show that under climate change projected by WorldClim under three different climate change scenarios, up to similar to 36,983km(2) of land may become available for agriculture by 2100 in the high mountains of Nepal. If all this area is utilized for agriculture, up to 3.1 GtC (gigaton carbon) would be released from soil carbon and 0.12 GtC from above ground carbon stores, 11,129 km(2) of tree cover would be impacted, 9934 km(2) of protected areas would be impacted, and river systems will be impacted as 4446 km(2) of climate-driven agricultural frontiers identified in this study lie within 200m of a river. These results highlight that agricultural frontiers will emerge in northwestern part of Nepal, which would have very important food security implication as this region of Nepal has been suffering from a very high level of food insecurity. However, before moving toward any potential development of agricultural activities, in-depth analysis about the potential food production benefit of developing frontiers against their potential ecosystem service trade-offs is needed.