Climate change and adaptation in agriculture: Evidence from US cropping patterns

By X. Cui. 2020

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Understanding how a changing climate alters regional comparative advantage is crucial for evaluating the economic impacts of climate change. I exploit temporal variation in decades-long averages of weather and estimate crop acreage elasticities with respect to climate change in the United States. I find substantial climate change adaptation through acreage adjustments in US agriculture. Climate change explains about 10–35% of the observed US corn and soybean expansion over the past 30 years, and climate-driven crop substitution has played an important role. The acreage response is heterogeneous across major and minor producing areas and across dryland and irrigated counties.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e92ea62582d0d41b6fe080eb5359606f0e29e1c4