The Impact of Global Warming on U.S. Agriculture: An Econometric Analysis of Optimal Growing Conditions

By W. Schlenker, Michael Hanemann, Anthony Fisher. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2004

581 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We link farmland values to climatic, soil, and socioeconomic variables for U.S. counties east of the 100th meridian, the historical boundary of agriculture not primarily dependent on irrigation. Degree days, a nonlinear transformation of the climatic variables suggested by agronomic experiments as more relevant to crop yield, gives an improved fit and increased robustness. Estimated coefficients are consistent with the experimental results. The model is employed to estimate the potential impacts on farmland values for a range of recent warming scenarios. The predictions are very robust, and more than 75 of the counties in our sample show a statistically significant effect, ranging from moderate gains to large losses, with losses in the aggregate that can become quite large under scenarios involving sustained heavy use of fossil fuels.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c7278ea9aba2f386f28c0dd846856eeed1672c1c

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Citations in the corpus

Climate change and migration: Is agriculture the main channel? (2019, background): “…one hand, several papers have studied the effects of weather and climate change on agricultural (and overall) productivity (Mendelsohn et al., 1994; Schlenker et al., 2006; Deschenes and 1Of course, there exist a large micro literature investigating both internal and international migration,…”
Limitations of integrated assessment models of climate change (2009, background): “A recent conference was devoted to the implications of “avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” as a guide to policy-making (Schellnhuber et al. 2006).”
A Ricardian Analysis of the Impact of Climate Change on European Agriculture (2016, unknown): “The climate sensitivity of rainfed farms cannot be used to predict the climate 464 outcome of the entire agricultural system (as suggested by Schlenker et al. (2005) and Schlenker et al. (2006)).”
The Impacts of Global Warming on Farmers in Brazil and India (2008, background): “These results explain the Schlenker et al. (2006) results for the US while revealing that irrigation does not lead to a bias in the overall Ricardian results.”
Nonlinear temperature effects indicate severe damages to U.S. crop yields under climate change (2009, methodology): “We compare our own three specifications of temperature effects (step function, polynomial, and piecewise linear) with three alternative specifications: (i) a model with average temperatures for each of four months (1); (ii) an approximation of growingdegree days based on monthly average temperatures”
Climate Change, Mortality, and Adaptation: Evidence from Annual Fluctuations in Weather in the US (2011, unknown): “Also, see Schlenker, Hanemann, and Fisher (2006).”
Estimating the Impact of Climate Change on Agriculture in Low-Income Countries: Household Level Evidence from the Nile Basin, Ethiopia (2011, background): “…on climate change in 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…”
The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP): Protocols and Pilot Studies (2013, unknown): “Method-ologies for assessing the biophysical effects of climate on crop yield include statistical models (e.g., Schlenker et al., 2006; Lobell and Burke, 2010) and process-based dynamic crop growth models (e.g., Keating et al., 2003; Brisson et al., 2003; Jones et al., 2003; van Ittersum and…”