A Ricardian Analysis of the Impact of Climate Change on African Cropland

By P. Kurukulasuriya, R. Mendelsohn. 2007

481 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study examines the impact of climate change on cropland in Africa. It is based on a survey of more than 9,000 farmers in 11 countries: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Niger, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The study uses a Ricardian cross-sectional approach in which net revenue is regressed on climate, water flow, soil, and economic variables. The results show that net revenues fall as precipitation falls or as temperatures warm across all the surveyed farms. In addition to examining all farms together, the study examined dryland and irrigated farms separately. Dryland farms are especially climate sensitive. Irrigated farms have a positive immediate response to warming because they are located in relatively cool parts of Africa. The study also examined some simple climate scenarios to see how Africa would respond to climate change. These uniform scenarios assume that only one aspect of climate changes and the change is uniform across all of Africa. In addition, the study examined three climate change scenarios from Atmospheric Oceanic General Circulation Models. These scenarios predicted changes in climate in each country over time. Not all countries are equally vulnerable to climate change. First, the climate scenarios predict different temperature and precipitation changes in each country. Second, it is also important whether a country is already hot and dry. Third, the extent to which farms are irrigated is also important.

Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c247b41465f3708a0834450a18cb942713d594ec

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Citations in the corpus

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.”
The Use of Cross-Sectional Analysis to Measure Climate Impacts on Agriculture: Theory and Evidence (2017, unknown): “Some studies have adjusted for surface water by including the amount of water available (Mendelsohn and Dinar 2003; Massetti and Mendelsohn 2011, 2012; Kurukulasuriya and Mendelsohn 2008).”
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): “technologies (SWC) (Di Falco et al. 2011; Antle 2009; Kurukulasuriya and Mendelsohn 2008; Amsalu and de Graaff 2007).”
Adaptation to climate change in Sub-Saharan agriculture: assessing the evidence and rethinking the drivers (2014, background): “Moving into a mixed crop livestock system is also related to diversification and adaptation (e.g. Hassan and Nhemachena, 2008; Kurukulasuriya and Mendelsohn, 2008a; Seo and Mendelsohn, 2008).”
Estimating the Impact of Climate Change on Agriculture in Low-Income Countries: Household Level Evidence from the Nile Basin, Ethiopia (2011, background): “…agriculture (Mendelsohn et al. 1994, 1996, 2001; Mendelsohn and Dinar 1999, 2003; Deressa 2006; Kurukulasuriya et al. 2006; Schlenker et al. 2006; Kurukulasuriya and Mendelsohn 2008a,b; Seo and Mendelsohn 2008a,b; Wang et al. 2008; Lobell et al. 2008) by examining the impact of key climatic…”
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.”
The impact of climate change on China's agriculture. (2009, methodology): “Even with adaptation, studies applying the Ricardian approach in Africa ( Kurukulasuriya and Mendelsohn, 2008; Kurukulasuriya et al., 2006) and South America (Seo and Mendelsohn, 2008) suggest that warming will reduce farm net revenues.”
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.”