The Poverty Implications of Climate-Induced Crop Yield Changes by 2030

Thomas Hertel, Marshall Burke and David Lobell

GTAP Working Papers from Center for Global Trade Analysis, Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University

Abstract: Accumulating evidence suggests that agricultural production could be greatly affected by climate change, but there remains little quantitative understanding of how these agricultural impacts would affect economic livelihoods in poor countries. Here we consider three scenarios of agricultural impacts of climate change by 2030 (impacts resulting in low, medium, or high productivity) and evaluate the resulting changes in global commodity prices, national economic welfare, and the incidence of poverty in a set of 15 developing countries. Although the small price changes under the medium scenario are consistent with previous findings, we find the potential for much larger food price changes than reported in recent studies which have largely focused on the most likely outcomes. In our low productivity scenario, prices for major staples rise 10-60% by 2030. The poverty impacts of these price changes depend as much on where impoverished households earn their income as on the agricultural impacts themselves, with poverty rates in some non-agricultural household groups rising by 20-50% in parts of Africa and Asia under these price changes, and falling by equal amounts for agriculture-specialized households elsewhere in Asia and Latin America. The potential for such large distributional effects within and across countries emphasizes the importance of looking beyond central case climate shocks and beyond a simple focus on yields - or highly aggregated poverty impacts.

Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ene and nep-env
Note: GTAP Working Paper No. 59
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (117)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.gtap.agecon.purdue.edu/resources/res_display.asp?RecordID=3196 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gta:workpp:3196

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GTAP Working Papers from Center for Global Trade Analysis, Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jeremy Douglas (dougla32@purdue.edu).