Evolution of Agroclimatic Indicators in Senegal Using CMIP6 Simulations

Climate has a strong influence on agriculture, which is considered the most dependent human activity on climate variations. The future performance of the Senegalese agricultural sector will depend on its ability to adapt to the negative impacts of climate change. This study demonstrated that the impact of three climate change scenarios (ssp126, ssp245 and ssp585) on the evolution of 14 agro-climatic indicators is already evident in Senegal in the near and distant future. Indeed, the results obtained show a generalized decrease over the whole country in seasonal rainfall totals of about -10% in the near future (2020-2049; PSE horizon) up to -40% in the distant future (2070-2099) for the ssp585 scenario. This decrease in precipitation will be associated with two phenomena, namely a shortening of the rainy season due to increasingly late starts and an increase in dry spells, particularly the DSl and DSxl. The other trend observed is an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall events (R99 and R20), which illustrates an increasingly chaotic distribution of rain in the future. Finally, this characterization of agroclimatic indicators made it possible to evaluate and classify the sensitivity of four global models corrected by the CFD-t method in order to run agronomic simulations and to explore adaptation strategies for farmer management in the future.