Economic impacts of climate change on agriculture: The importance of additional climatic variables other than temperature and precipitation
Climate change shifts the distributions of a set of climatic variables, including temperature, precipitation, humidity, wind speed, sunshine duration, and evaporation. This paper explores the importance of those additional climatic variables other than temperature and precipitation. Using the county-level agricultural data from 1980 to 2010 in China, we find that those additional climatic variables, especially humidity and wind speed, are critical for crop growth. Therefore, omitting those variables is likely to bias the predicted impacts of climate change on crop yields. In particular, omitting humidity tends to overpredict the cost of climate change on crop yields, while ignoring wind speed is likely to underpredict the effect. Our preferred specification indicates that climate change is likely to decrease the yields of rice, wheat, and corn in China by 36.25%, 18.26%, and 45.10%, respectively, by the end of this century.
Duke Scholars
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- Agricultural Economics & Policy
- 3801 Applied economics
- 1402 Applied Economics
- 1401 Economic Theory
- 0502 Environmental Science and Management
Citation
Published In
DOI
EISSN
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- Agricultural Economics & Policy
- 3801 Applied economics
- 1402 Applied Economics
- 1401 Economic Theory
- 0502 Environmental Science and Management