Modelling the impact of climate change on cereal yield in Morocco

To assess the impact of climate change different studies were conducted in several regions of Morocco. The assessment of climate change and its impacts involves the simulation of a range of different socio-economic and physical processes. Some of these processes are well known such temperature, rainfall, storms, etc.., others not. Hence for each modeling step researchers need to consider what is known, what is not known, and how climate change can be expressed.This paper is a contribution to research on climate change impact on cereal yield in the last 50 years. The application of the multiple linear regression model to a set of time series of yield, rainfall, temperature and storm has generated significant coefficients that can explain the relation between yield and the three climate variables. The model output confirms the results of the previous studies of yield variability. The positive effect of rainfall and the negative one of storm and temperature ware recorded. Above the three factors, temperature and storms have a negative effect on cereal yield. So more efforts on germplasm, crop management and agricultural policy measures are needed to alleviate the impact of climate change. An estimate coefficient of -4.943 for temperature is very indicating the high impact of temperature on yield. The R² is around 0.45indicates that more than 55% of total yield variability is explained by other factors than rain, temperature and storm.