Estimated effects of climate variability on agricultural production in Colombia

Abstract

The objectives of this document are to assess the impact of climate variability on agricultural production in Colombiaand identify the effectiveness of irrigation districts as an adaptation measure. For the analysis, a panel ofmultidimensional data with random effects was used to estimate the effect on crops reported in 1,101 Colombianmunicipalities, between 2007 and 2017. Two variables were taken as climatic shocks: the sum of the absolute differencesin the monthly precipitation compared to its historical mean and the average of the differences in the monthlytemperature with respect to its historical average. The interaction between irrigation districts and rainfall levels was usedas an adaptability variable. The results indicate that the three-dimensional data panel model presented in this papershowed great applicability despite its low use and the small number of documents that exist on climate effects onagricultural production. The main conclusions are that temperature increases lead to decreases in agricultural productionand that irrigation districts as a measure of adaptation to climate variability do not appear to have a significant impact tocounteract it. We found that practices such as the use of shades could influence the reduction of temperatures locally.Similarly, it is necessary to analyses the impact of measures that mitigate the effects associated with changes intemperature rather than those related to the precipitation regime.