Essays On The Nexus Of Climate Change Agricultural Productivity And The Environment

Agriculture is highly dependent on and sensitive to weather. Warming effects result from greenhouse gas emissions and aerosols from a small number of countries but its impact will be felt on a global scale. So far, agricultural productivity growth has sustained the continuous global supply of food but will this continue into the foreseeable future with the incidence of climate change? The effects of climate change on crop yields have been the focus of several studies. However, the sensitivity of agricultural productivity (measured as Total Factor Productivity-TFP) to climate change is not well understood. The first essay examines how historical changes in temperature and precipitation have affected the evolution of agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) while accounting for the short and long term impact. A fixed effect regression model for 128 countries for a period of 1961 to 2014 was employed to exploit yearly changes in temperature and precipitation as the identification strategy. Results show that precipitation has a significant effect on TFP growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, tropical and low income countries. Global short term temperature effect is offset in the long run showing that farmers adapt to reduce the effects of temperature in their behavioral decisions. Irrespective of the impact of climate change, there have been calls for an increase in agricultural productivity due to uncertainty and a global decline in Research and Development (R&D) expenditures. Previous literature accounts for the effect of global TFP growth on global food security and the environment. My second essay estimates the impact of TFP growth in different regions on global food security and the environment using a partial equilibrium model. To construct comparable TFP shocks across regions, I consider three TFP shock scenarios: (i) a uniform 100 percent increase in TFP growth in each region, (ii) TFP growth in each region that gives the same decrease in global commodity price, and (iii) TFP growth in each region resulting from the same increase in R&D expenditure. Results show that a 100% increase in TFP in the US & Canada increases agricultural carbon emission within the US & Canada by 16.9% but with a net global decrease in agricultural carbon emissions by 4.27%. In addition, a 100% increase in TFP in the US & Canada decreases global food security (malnutrition) by 13.09%. These results provide justification to support increasing R&D expenditures in developed regions. Overall, TFP growth is most effective in Sub-Saharan Africa as it gives the largest reductions in malnutrition and carbon emissions.

Agriculture and climate changes are closely linked. Agriculture has a significant impact on the process of climate change. There is uncertainty surrounding the implications of climate change for agricultural production. This document consists of two studies on this relationship. The first study provides an analysis of the various methodologies that have been used to measure the potential impacts of climate change on agricultural production and makes suggestions for further research. The second study is on the impact of agriculture on climate. It gives a detailed analysis of the potential for implementing the Clean Development Mechanism proposed under the Kyoto Protocol Convention on Climate Change in the agricultural sector of developing countries along with the relevant policy implications and requirements

Explore the Relationship between Crop and ClimateAgricultural sustainability has been gaining prominence in recent years and is now becoming the focal point of modern agriculture. Recognizing that crop production is very sensitive to climate change, Climate Change Effect on Crop Productivity explores this timely topic in-depth. Incorporating contri

This monograph addresses the methodological and empirical issues relevant for the development of sustainable agriculture, with a particular focus on Eastern Europe. It relates economic growth to the other dimensions of sustainability by applying integrated methods. The book comprises five chapters dedicated to the theoretical approaches towards sustainable rural development, productivity analysis, structural change analysis and environmental footprint. The book focuses on the transformations of the agricultural sector while taking into account economic, environmental, and social dynamics. The importance of agricultural transformations to the livelihood of the rural population and food security are highlighted. Further, advanced methodologies and frameworks are presented to fathom the underlying trends in different facets of agricultural production. The authors present statistical methods used for the analysis of agricultural sustainability along with applications for agriculture in the European Union. Additionally, they discuss the measures of efficiency, methodological approaches and empirical models. Finally, the book applies econometric and optimization techniques, which are useful for the estimation of the production functions and other representations of technology in the case of the European Union member states. Therefore, the book is a must-read for researchers and students of agricultural and production economics, as well as policy-makers and academia in general.

The edited book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of scientific developments in agricultural sustainability under changing climate conditions. It focuses on the linkages among soil, water, and crops and their management options to maintain soil health and ensure a sustainable crop production environment. The book addresses the scenarios and challenges of agricultural sustainability in the face of climatic change. With increasing pressure on our limited land and water resources to produce higher crop yields for a growing global population, the efficient use of soil, water, and fertilizers is crucial for achieving most of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The book presents climate change mitigation and adaptation options to help achieve these SDGs. It highlights the impact of climate variability on agricultural production and the functions of ecosystems, emphasizing the importance of developing climate-resilient agriculture to sustain food production and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The book explores the soil-water-plant nexus and its response to changing climate, characterizing seasonal and inter-annual climatic variability in crop growth and yield. Different chapters evaluate the effects of climate change on soil health degradation, depletion of soil nutrients and carbon contents, and crop responses to climate variability. This book is of interest to academicians, researchers, scientists, capacity builders, and policymakers. Extension personnel will benefit from its insights, and it serves as valuable supporting material for graduate students of agriculture, forestry, ecology, soil science, and environmental sciences in understanding and designing their own research.

The book 'Climate Change and Agricultural Food Production: Impacts, Vulnerabilities and Remedies' provides an overview of climate change impacts on all agricultural food producing sectors (agriculture, livestock and fisheries), food contamination, and food safety (microbial pathogens, toxic biological & toxic chemical contaminants), food security and climate change adaptation and mitigation measures to counteract or minimise or reduce the effects of climate change on agriculture, livestock and fisheries. It reviews and summarizes research results, data and information from the world including Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, North America, Polar Regions and Small Island Nations. The book has been structured as textbook, reference book and extension book and written in simple and plain English with key facts and acronyms and glossary provided in each with tables and figures to benefit a wide range of readeThe key data and information provided in each are highlighted below:

Ô. . . this book is a very useful resource for the lawyer. . . makes a good start by presenting a wide-ranging portfolio of multidisciplinary research that will assist in progressing the task, challenging though it may be.Õ Ð Chris Rodgers, Environmental Liability This book explores the interaction between climate change and the agriculture sector. Agriculture is essential to the livelihood of people and nations, especially in the developing world; therefore, any impact on it will have significant economic, social, and political ramifications. Scholars from around the world and from various fields have been brought together to explore this important topic. The contributions found here analyze direct agronomic effects, the economic impacts on agriculture, agricultural impacts on the economy, agricultural mitigation, and farmer adaptation. The authors argue that climate change is likely to have an extensive impact on agriculture around the world through changes in temperature, precipitation, concentrations of carbon dioxide, and available water flows. This thorough and timely volume is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in exploring the impacts of climate change in arguably the most important sector of the world economy. Economists, agronomists, and climate modelers in academia and the public sector, policy analysts and development agency staff, and graduate/postgraduate students will find this remarkable volume a welcome addition to their collection.

This book contributes to the on-going debates on climate change by focusing on the SDGs and exploring linkages between environmental change and food security as well as the relevance and need to consider the management of natural resources, especially water, soil and forest. Compared to relevant existing publications, this book covers case studies that capture the everyday realities of the local people and how they react and adapt to similar situations in different geographical settings. Each case study presented in this book gives a particular message. The strength of this book lies in the fact that it covers the most neglected topics in climate negotiations in spite of the fact that these decide the fate of millions of people around the world, especially the developing countries. By presenting a collection of case studies from Africa, Asia and Europe, this book encourages cross-continental knowledge sharing. The scope of the book ranges from impacts to mitigation and from in-field experiments to policy implementation. It contributes to the existing knowledge on climate-food nexus and connects climate change to sectors it could impact directly. All chapters in this book emphasise local ownership of strategy processes, effective participation from all levels, and high-level commitment. Besides being relevant for the academicians and scholars working in the field of climate change, forest and agriculture, it aims to catch interest of the policy makers and practitioners to understand ground realities for appropriate action. It is also bound to make an impact on the Non-Governmental Organizations around the world and in the three different continents that this book covers, considering the indigenous and local issues highlighted in this book.

Understanding Climate Change Impacts on Crop Productivity and Water examines the greenhouse gas emissions and their warming effect, climate change projections, crop productivity and water. The book explores the most important greenhouse gases that influence the climate system, technical terms associated with climate projections, and the different mechanisms impacting crop productivity and water balance. Adaptive and mitigative strategies are proposed to cope with negative effects of climate change in particular domains. This book will help researchers interested in climate change impacts on the atmosphere, soil and plants. Uncovers links between climate change and its impact on crop and water outputs Integrates information on greenhouse gas cycles and mathematical equations into climate/crop models for analysis and seasonal prediction systems Provides strategies for efficient resource management and sustainable crop production in future Helps researchers interested in climate change impacts on the atmosphere, soil and plants

This dissertation incorporates three independent essays on the impact of climate change on the United States' agriculture, with each explores a different facet of climate change. There have been heated debates about the potential impact of climate change on the United States' agriculture. Several influential studies such as Schlenker, Hanemann, and Fisher (2005, 2006), Schlenker and Roberts (2006) suggest a potentially large negative impact of climate change on farmland values and crop yields, while others including Mendelsohn, Nordhaus, and Shaw (1994), and Deschenes and Greenstone (2007) believe that there is little impact or the US agriculture could be a major beneficiary of global warming. These opposing results inspired my work to examine another aspect of climate change that has not been carefully addressed in the current literature: the impact of climate and weather extremes. While any individual extreme event cannot be causally linked to climate change, there could be a higher probability of more severe extreme events in the future. There are several potential scenarios in which we may expect more heating, less cooling, and less fluctuations between the extremes with different forms of distributional shifts in climatic conditions, all having the same change in the mean temperature. For example, climate change may result in increased precipitations in Northern America in the form of more droughts and more flooding events. These differential changes in the distribution of climatic conditions may have a subtle impact on agriculture, which could not be identified by studying moment variables such as the mean and the variance of temperatures or precipitations. The three essays inherited two major empirical methods widely used in estimating the impact of climate change: hedonic regression and panel data. Hedonic regressions (also called the Ricardian approach) utilize cross-sectional variations to identify how climatic conditions such as the average temperature or precipitation capitalize in farmland values, and panel estimations that employ within variations to link weathers with annual crop yields or farm profits. However, there is a situation in which both techniques are insufficient. If economic agents have forward-looking behaviors, and under uncertainties, the decision making process will involve a dynamic optimization problem whose a reduced-form approach as derived from either cross-sectional or panel data technique may not truly identify the actual behaviors. I devised an innovative dynamic programming approach built up on the Ricardian method to estimate the impact of natural disasters such as extreme drought events on cropland conversions. In the first essay, using historical crop yield reports paired with high-resolution climate data, I discovered a small and positive effect of a decreasing diurnal temperature range on yields of five major crops including corns, wheat, cotton, soybeans, and sorghum. The asymmetric increases in observed maximum and minimum temperature have resulted in a falling diurnal temperature range across the United States. This effect could help mitigate some potential harmful impacts of climate change in the future, averaging up to a two percent yield offset for summer crops. Meanwhile, little impact on winter crops is expected. Moreover, the overall impact of climate change from a rising mean temperature and less fluctuations is dominantly harmful for most crops. The second essay presents a structural model of cropland conversions with an application to the impact of extreme droughts. Droughts are perhaps the most destructive events to the US agriculture. Extended periods of severe droughts in the late 20th century caused widespread economic damages comparable to that of the Dust Bowl in 1930s. I showed that those events contributed to converting lands from agricultural production to urban uses by damaging soil productivity and lowering farming profits. I concluded the Ricardian approach to estimating climate change impacts is insufficient. Specifically, the Ricardian method works well for equilibrium adjustments by assuming that farm owners are able to make complete adaptations to a changing environment. However, the Ricardian approach fails to take into account the presence of climate extremes whose adaptations are neither possible nor costless. As a consequence, this method may underestimate the true cost of transient events related to climate change such as extreme droughts. This finding carries a significant implication for the future of the US' private croplands. As the US is predicted to experience more precipitations in the future with climate change, it seems that there would be a beneficial impact of more water for crops. It may not necessarily be the case, however. Even with increased precipitations, drought conditions may occur more frequently and intensively. Damages from potentially extreme drought events were not considered in the Ricardian estimates. In the third essay, I examined the impact of extreme heating conditions on prime farmland conversions in California using the hedonic regression technique with a spatial dataset. I focused on the number of extreme heating days, defined as day with the recorded maximum temperature rises above 90 degree Fahrenheit. I found a small but significant nonlinear impact of extreme heating days on farmland conversions. A mild increase in the number of extreme heating days may be good for crops, thus helps keep farmlands in agricultural production. However, too excessive heating is harmful and accelerates conversions out of farming.