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Climate model projections coupled with process-based crop models are advocated for assessing impacts of climate change on crop yields and for informing crop-level adaptations. However, most reported studies are vague on the choice of the global circulation models (GCMs) for climate projections, and on the corresponding uncertainty with this type of model simulations. Here we investigated whether climate-crop modelling can be used for identifying crop management-level adaptation options. We focused our analyses on a case study for maize in southern Africa using the APSIM crop growth model and projections from 17 individual climate models for the period 2017–2060 for the contrasting representative concentration pathways 2.6 and 8.5. Intensification of nitrogen fertiliser use (from 30 to 90 kg N ha⁻¹) was simulated as an example of a crop management-level adaptation to climate change …