A Ricardian Analysis of the Distribution of Climate Change Impacts on Agriculture across Agro-Ecological Zones in Africa

By S. Seo, R. Mendelsohn, Ariel Dinar, R. Hassan, P. Kurukulasuriya. 2008

193 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper examines the distribution of climate change impacts across the sixteen Agro-Ecological Zones (AEZs) of Africa. We combine net revenue from livestock and crops and regress total net revenue on a set of climate, soil, and socio-economic variables with and without country fixed effects. Although African crop net revenue is very sensitive to climate change, combined livestock and crop net revenue is more climate resilient. With the hot and dry CCC climate scenario, average damage estimates reach 27% by 2100, but with the mild and wet PCM scenario, African farmers will benefit. The analysis of AEZs implies that the effects of climate change will be quite different across Africa. For example, currently productive areas such as dry/moist savannah are more vulnerable to climate change while currently less productive agricultural zones such as humid forest or sub-humid AEZs become more productive in the future.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/923ac4b11d47a4d9a61337b191f4c552d38535ae

Citations in the corpus

• Managing Environmental Risk in Presence of Climate Change: The Role of Adaptation in the Nile Basin of Ethiopia (2014, unknown): “…is referred to Mendelsohn et al. (1994), Gbetibouo and Hassan (2005), Seo and Mendelsohn (2008b), Hassan and Nhemachena (2008), Kurukulasuriya and Mendelsohn (2008), and Seo et al. (2009). employment stem from the agricultural sector (Ministry of Finance and Economic Development, MoFED 2007).”
• The Use of Cross-Sectional Analysis to Measure Climate Impacts on Agriculture: Theory and Evidence (2017, unknown): “An alternative to using precise temperature and precipitation data is to use agroecological zones (AEZs) to capture climate (Seo et al 2009; Kala, Kurukulasuriya, and Mendelsohn 2012).”
• Climate change and variability in Sub-Saharan Africa: a review of current and future trends and impacts on agriculture and food security (2011, unknown): “Among the many adverse impacts of climate change, the risk to agriculture is considered most significant (Cline 2007; Dinar et al. 2008; Kurukulasuriya and Mendelsohn 2008a, b; Seo et al. 2009 ), as majority of the world’s population; especially those in the developing countries highly depend on ag”
• A Ricardian Analysis of the Impact of Climate Change on South American Farms (2008, unknown): “In several studies, the land value per hectare of cropland has been found to be sensitive to seasonal precipitation and temperature (Mendelsohn et al., 1994, 1999, 2001; Dinar et al., 1998; Mendelsohn 2001; Mendelsohn and Dinar, 2003; Seo et al., 2005; 2008).”
• The Impact of Climate Change on Agriculture: Nonlinear Effects and Aggregation Bias in Ricardian Models of Farmland Values (2013, unknown): “In recent years, this approach has been applied to various countries across the globe, including the United States (e.g., Schlenker, Hanemann, and Fisher 2005, 2006), Brazil (Timmins 2006), Germany (Lang 2007), Latin America (Seo and Mendelsohn 2008), and Africa (Seo et al. 2009).”