Legislative responsiveness to climate change: politically driven adaptation in California's agricultural sector

Paige Pellaton, Jonathan P. Colner, Alex Cohen, Cory Struthers, Siddharth Kishore, Scott A. MacKenzie, Matthew S. Shugart, Mehdi Nemati and Ariel Dinar

Chapter 21 in Handbook on Climate Change Impacts, Mitigation, and Adaptation in Agriculture, 2026, pp 490-512 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Responses to climate change by farmers and others include private on-farm adjustments to current practices, and public programs to mitigate or adapt to its impacts. Less understood is political adaptation, whereby farmers and others lobby elected officials for policy changes. We study political adaptation by assessing legislative responsiveness to climate change. Rather than examining a few high-profile policies or searching bills for keywords, we develop a topic model to classify 44,109 bills introduced in the California State Legislature between 2001 and 2020. We provide examples of bills enhancing private adaptation, and statistical analyses that identify when lawmakers sponsor agricultural and environmental legislation. Our findings link lawmakers’ occupational experiences, constituency characteristics, and extreme weather in their districts to their bill sponsorship. In documenting legislative responsiveness to evolving conditions in the most populous and productive farm state of the US, we illuminate how individual lawmakers and political adaptation are critical to addressing climate change.

Keywords: Agriculture; Bill Sponsorship; Climate Change; Environmental Policy; Legislative Studies; State Politics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035344963
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