A Ricardian Analysis of the Impact of Climate Change on South American Farms

By S. Seo, R. Mendelsohn. 2008

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A B S T R A C T This study estimates the impact of climate change on South American agriculture taking into account farmer adaptations. The study used a Ricardian analysis of 2300 farms to explore the effects of global warming on land values. In order to predict climate change impacts for this century, were examined climate change scenarios predicted by three Atmospheric Oceanic General Circulation Models (AOGCM): the Canadian Climate Center (CCC), the Centre for Climate System Research (CCSR), and the Parallel Climate Model (PCM) models. Several econometric specifications were tested, and five separate regressions were run: for all farms, small household farms, large commercial farms, rainfed farms, and irrigated farms. Farmland values will decrease as temperature increases, but also as rainfall increases except for the case of irrigated farms. Under the severe Canadian Climate Center (CCC) scenario, South American farmers will lose on average 14% of their income by the year 2020, 20% by 2060, and 53% by 2100, but half of these estimates under the less severe Centre for Climate System Research (CCSR) scenario. However, farms will lose only small amounts of income under the mild and wet Parallel Climate Model (PCM) scenario. Both small household farms and large commercial farms are highly vulnerable, but small farms are more vulnerable to warming, while large farms are more vulnerable to rainfall increases. Both rainfed and irrigated farms will lose their incomes by more than 50% by 2100, with slightly more severe damage to irrigated farms, but the subsample analysis treats irrigation as exogenous.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/42c31bb512c6d3f4c7ad1eaf54672395506bc2c0

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Citations in the corpus

The Impacts of Global Warming on Farmers in Brazil and India (2008, background): “Perhaps more relevant to this argument, Kurukulasuriya and Mendelsohn (2008) in Africa, Seo and Mendelsohn (2008) in South America, and Wang et al. (2008) in China show that the climate sensitivity of rain-fed farms is indeed much higher than the climate sensitivity of irrigated farms.”
The Impact of Climate Change on Agriculture in Developing Countries (2008, background): “Several Ricardian analyses have explicitly distinguished between irrigated and rain-fed land in order to address this concern (Kurukulasuriya & Mendelsohn, 2008a ,c; Seo & Mendelsohn, 2008c ; Wang et al.”
How Can African Agriculture Adapt to Climate Change? A Counterfactual Analysis from Ethiopia (2012, methodology): “…change adaptation strategies within a Ricardian framework.2 This is within the spirit of the so-called structural Ricardian analysis (pioneered by Seo and Mendelsohn 2008a, 2008b; Seo 2010; Kurukulasuriya and Mendelsohn 2008).3 In particular, we investigate whether implementing these strategies…”
Estimating the Impact of Climate Change on Agriculture in Low-Income Countries: Household Level Evidence from the Nile Basin, Ethiopia (2011, background): “However, little evidence is available on how climate change affects farmers’ adaptation strategies at the household level and the subsequent crop yield and revenues (notable exceptions are Seo and Mendelsohn 2008a,b and Di Falco et al. 2011).”
The Economic Valuation of Environmental Amenities and Disamenities: Methods and Applications (2009, background): “Ricardian studies in Africa (81) and Latin America (83), however, suggest warming will lead to crop damages.”
Climatic impacts across agricultural crop yield distributions: An application of quantile regression on rice crops in Andhra Pradesh, India (2013, background): “3 °C over the 1980–1999 average (Solomon et al., 2007). Assessment of future impact of climate change ismainly built on GCM predictions. In the most common set up, a mild scenario with two extreme scenarios on either side is considered.We base our forecast scenario on studies by Sanghi andMendelsohn”
The impact of climate change on China's agriculture. (2009, background): “In repeated studies in the United States, Brazil, Sri Lanka, and South America, the land value per hectare of cropland has been found to be sensitive to seasonal precipitation and temperature (Mendelsohn and Dinar, 1999, 2003; Seo and Mendelsohn, 2008; Seo et al., 2005).”
Response to climate risks among smallholder farmers in Malawi: A multivariate probit assessment of the role of information, household demographics, and farm characteristics (2015, background): “While most of these use single adaptation options (e.g. Kurukulasuriya and Mendelsohn 2008; Seo and Mendelsohn 2008), Nhemachena & Hassan (2007) uses a multivariate probit method to investigate barriers to climate change adaptation in the context of South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.”
Smallholder farmer cropping decisions related to climate variability across multiple regions (2014, background): “Some studies have identified long- or short-run adaptation among farmers (Guiteras, 2009; Kurukulasuriya et al., 2006; Mendelsohn et al., 1994; Schlenker and Lobell, 2010; Schlenker and Roberts, 2009; Seo and Mendelsohn, 2008), but have been unable to discuss specific adaptation strategies.”
A Ricardian Analysis of the Distribution of Climate Change Impacts on Agriculture across Agro-Ecological Zones in Africa (2008, unknown): “There is evidence that some livestock are heat tolerant and that farmers will switch to these species in hotter places and thus reduce their climate vulnerability (Seo and Mendelsohn 2008b,c).”