The Poverty Implications of Climate-Induced Crop Yield Changes by 2030

By Thomas W. Hertel, Marshall Burke, David B. Lobell. GTAP Working Paper, 2010

534 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Accumulating evidence suggests that agricultural production could be greatly affected by climate change, but there remains little quantitative understanding of how these agricultural impacts would affect economic livelihoods in poor countries. Here we consider three scenarios of agricultural impacts of climate change by 2030 (impacts resulting in low, medium, or high productivity) and evaluate the resulting changes in global commodity prices, national economic welfare, and the incidence of poverty in a set of 15 developing countries. Although the small price changes under the medium scenario are consistent with previous findings, we find the potential for much larger food price changes than reported in recent studies which have largely focused on the most likely outcomes. In our low productivity scenario, prices for major staples rise 10-60% by 2030. The poverty impacts of these price changes depend as much on where impoverished households earn their income as on the agricultural impacts themselves, with poverty rates in some non-agricultural household groups rising by 20-50% in parts of Africa and Asia under these price changes, and falling by equal amounts for agriculture-specialized households elsewhere in Asia and Latin America. The potential for such large distributional effects within and across countries emphasizes the importance of looking beyond central case climate shocks and beyond a simple focus on yields – or highly aggregated poverty impacts.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science

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Citations in the corpus

The role of international trade in managing food security risks from climate change (2015, background): “In their general equilibrium analysis of long run climate trends, Hertel et al. (2010) conclude that the poverty impacts of adverse climate change are most severe amongst nonagricultural households in Africa and South Asia.”
Regional disparities in the CO2 fertilization effect and implications for crop yields (2013, background): “…and DOI. has been that the economic and food security impacts of climate change depend not only on the average global impact, but also on regional differences in impacts, which affect relative competitiveness for regionally or globally traded goods (Rosenzweig and Parry 1994, Hertel et al 2010).”
Climate Change, Global Food Security, and the U.S. Food System (2015, background): “One approach is to link a global model to nationally disaggregated data (Hertel et al. 2010).”
Virtual water trade flows and savings under climate change (2013, methodology): “This is because direct climate impacts to local water and food resources provide only a partial understanding, since agricultural production systems are inter-connected through trade (Hertel et al., 2010; Lobell et al., 2011).”
The meat of the global food crisis (2013, background): “…declining water availability, especially in drier mid-latitude areas (Schmidhuber and Tubiello 2007, Nellemann et al. 2008, McIntyre et al. 2009, Hertel et al. 2010, FAO 2011c).11 There are growing fears that yields may be far more sensitive to temperature increases than previous thought, and…”
Agricultural Adaptation to Climate Change in Rich and Poor Countries: Current Modeling Practice and Potential for Empirical Contributions (2012, background): “Climate change is also likely to be accompanied by relative price changes, with those products which are more severely affected at the regional or global scales experiencing relative price increases (Hertel, Burke, and Lobell 2010).”
Induced Mutations Unleash the Potentials of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (2013, background): “insecure regions of the developing world [3–6], these resources are either stagnant or are dwindling on accounts of additional demands for them by the demographic and economic pressures of urbanization and the competing needs for producing livestock feeds, bioenergy production and several other indu”
A multi-model assessment of food security implications of climate change mitigation (2019, unknown): “47 48 Acknowledgement; 49 SFu, TH, and KT are supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP16K18177, JSPS 50 Overseas Research Fellowships, and the Environment Research and Technology 51 Development Fund (2-1702) of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency of 52 Japan.”