ADAPTATION OPTIONS TO CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS IN SLOVAKIA, AGRICULTURE

Agriculture sector is affected by changes in climate in many aspects. Adaptation activities focus on the potential to build sectoral resilience to climate and to increase adaptive capacity through sustainable management of agriculture and other complementary factors. In Slovak territory, which is mostly hilly, the climate change can bring the shift of climate zones and to move the most temperate regions to the north and to higher altitudes. General factors of the Slovak agriculture show about 1,9 mil. ha of cultivated area which is slowly shrinking as well as diminishing animal husbandry production. Quite stable structure of the production concentrated on the cereals production which occupied about 50% of agricultural land has strongly changed in favour of higher production of oil producing and other "technical" crops with big inter-annual changes in seeded areas. Further characteristics is the drastic shrink of irrigated area (from more than 300000 ha to about 120000 ha) in recent two decades. Diminishing agricultural area is a consequence of forestation, especially in mountainous areas, urbanization and on a part of agricultural area was any production abandoned because of low economic effectivity. Based on the index method (calculating indexes relevant for agricultural production: Length of vegetation period, Photosynthetically Active Radiation, precipitation, Evapotranspiration and Index of dryness over 1961-2010) the vulnerability of different geomorphological units to the risks in agriculture was assessed. The most productive areas situated in the south and south-east part of Slovakia show the highest level of vulnerability. By using the outputs of daily values of basic climate parameters from two global and two regional general circulation models above described indexes were calculated for the period up to 2100 and similar projections of the selected indexes together with their sapace distribution were done for the horizon 2061-90. The results showed the need of the adaptation measures for the next 1-2 decades as well as what we can expect within 50-80 years. It shows the change of productive potential of individual crop in the particular region and that the changes in precipitation amount will influence the water use for irrigation both in area and rate. Consequently, the suggestions for adapting measures to these changes in agricultural sector include following points: • change of structure of grown crops in Slovakia and the change of variety structure • adaptation of agro-technical terms (mainly sowing) to changed agro climatic conditions • to finish construction of irrigation system and to introduce much more portable irrigation systems • to ensure sufficient amount of irrigation water in cooperation with water services Further to the climatic assessment an economic analysis of the inputs to the adaptations and possible diminishing of the loses done by the climate change impacts was done. Computable general equilibrium model (CGE) was applied to evaluate the economic value of the estimated loses, the value of possibly applied adaptation measures and the value of the benefits. CGE represents a model of an integrated evaluation based on a macroeconomic structural model at the country level divided in to 11 selected economic sectors. Generally, the right applied adaptation measures in agriculture can bring 25-35% benefit in comparison if not being applied.

Key words: adaptation options, climate change, economic analysis