Abstract
An increase in global average surface temperature over the 21st century will affect food production. There is still uncertainty if the source of the production losses caused by climate change could be driven either by lower yield or reduced area harvested. We use county-level production data on winter wheat coupled with fine-scale weather outcomes between 1981-2007 to examine the impact of climate change on winter wheat production in Kansas. We decompose the total impact of weather variables through both the yield and harvested acreage channels. We find that an insignificant portion—both in terms of magnitude and statistical significance—of the production losses are due to reduced harvested acres (i.e., crop abandonment). The proportion harvested only account for 14.88% and 21.71% of the total damages under RCPs 4.5 and 8.5 and neither effect is statistically significant. An implication of this result implies that studies that only examine climate impacts on harvested yields are not significantly underestimating the climate change impacts on production.
Highlights
Changing climatic conditions are becoming one of the major challenges facing agricultural production globally as demand for staple foods increases
Data Availability Statement: The data underlying the results presented in the study are publicly available from USDA and Parameter-elevation Relationships on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM) and are within the manuscript and its Supporting information files
Climate change impacts agriculture through warming and drought conditions, which are likely to result in crop yield losses and reduction in the area harvested
Summary
Changing climatic conditions are becoming one of the major challenges facing agricultural production globally as demand for staple foods increases. There is a vast literature that uses statistical models to estimate the impact of weather shocks on yield, where yield is measured as total production divided by harvested acres [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. These papers implicitly assume that harvested acres do not change with climate change. According to Cui [18] and Ramankutty [19], using yield calculated from harvested acres as the sole source of production variability could significantly underestimate the impact of climate
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