The impact of climate change on livestock production in pastoral areas of China

Abstract

This study assesses the impacts of climate change on net livestock revenue, grazing intensity, and net revenue per livestock, based on a panel dataset of 959 herder households from 18 counties in three major pastoral provinces in China. The Ricardian model and the Hsiao two-step method are applied to quantify the impacts on household-level livestock production made by long-term changes of temperature and precipitation and short-term occurrence of natural disasters. The results indicate that long-term temperature leads to decreased net livestock revenue and net revenue per livestock, whereas long-term precipitation improves revenue per livestock. Next, both long-term annual temperature and precipitation result in an increase of grazing intensity. A further analysis based on the simulation of future climate change predicts that the future increase in temperature will have a negative influence on both net revenue and net revenue per livestock, while the precipitation increment will have a positive effect on livestock production.