Essays on Climate Change and Food Security

Abstract

Climate change is a major threat for the mankind, and it is considered as a big challenge of our time. Over the past decade, scientists and economists have shown consensus that agricultural production is at high risk due to climatic changes. Given the importance of food security, the present study deals with the economics of climate change and food security in three separate Essays. The thesis constitutes of three partially independent essays given in the subsequent chapters. The first essay (Chapter 2), examines the impact of climate change and technology adoption on cereal yields in the South Asian countries. An economic model has been developed that incorporates technology adoption, which is endogenous and exogenously determined by farmers’ characteristics and market structure. Besides that, our study also focuses on other climatic variables such as the wind speed and humidity, mostly which have been ignored in most of the previous literature. Using the time series data from 1990 to 2015, the GMM estimator has been applied to it. The estimated results indicate that climate change decreases the cereal yields while the technology adoption increases the cereal yields. The slow pace of technology adoption in the agriculture sector creates a challenge of meeting the food demand of the growing population in the South Asian countries. Second essay (Chapter 3), discusses the role of adaptation across the globe. Farmers do have some capabilities to adapt to the changing weather and climate, but this capability is contingent on some factors, that include geographical and socioeconomic conditions. Assessing the actual adaptation potential in the agricultural sector is therefore an empirical issue to which this research contributes by presenting a study examining the impact of climate change on cereal yields in 55 developing and developed countries, using the data from 1991 to 2015. Our results indicate that cereal yields are affected in all regions by changes in temperature and precipitation, with significant differences especially in certain regions in the world. In Southern Asia and Central Africa, farmers fail to adapt to climate change. Third essay (Chapter 4), develops an integrated assessment model on food security due to climate change in South Asia. For this purpose, we estimate an econometric model that identifies the impact of climate change on crop yields, using the historical relationship that exists between temperature, precipitation and the production of cereals in South Asia. Subsequently, the future projections for temperature and precipitation from climate models of the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) is taken into account. The previous econometric model is then applied to obtain the implied future crop yield changes. These yield variations are then fed into a multiregional Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model, calibrated to the GTAP 9 database, taking the form of decreases in factor-augmenting productivity of the grains sector. Finally, we proceed to evaluate the effects of climate change on individual South Asian countries. The results of our simulations indicate that change in climate decreases food production, increases food prices and thus adversely affects the welfare of a country. Further, we checked the trade and fiscal compensatory policy responses to climate change and found that these policies have failed to compensate the economic damage caused by climate change.