The color of water: The contributions of green and blue water to agricultural productivity in the Western Brazilian Amazon

Jill Caviglia-Harris, Trent Biggs, Elvino Ferreira, Daniel W. Harris, Katrina Mullan and Erin O. Sills

World Development, 2021, vol. 146, issue C

Abstract: Deforestation and global climate change are predicted to affect precipitation and agricultural productivity in the Amazon. Anecdotal evidence suggests that farmers are already being affected by changes in the timing and amount of precipitation, but there is little quantitative evidence on the mechanism by which precipitation affects production. This paper uses an innovative application of remote sensing and meteorological data to separate rainfall into green water (soil moisture that contributes to plant water use) and blue water (surface water), to estimate the impact of these water sources on the production and production efficiency of dairy in a mature colonization zone of the Brazilian Amazon. This approach allows us to draw inferences about different pathways through the precipitation-production causal chain and to link changes in precipitation with impacts on farm profits and welfare. We find that production and production efficiency are affected by green and blue water and that reductions in rainfall will have negative impacts that may disproportionally impact the poor. Our methods and results are informative to economists interested in this relatively new application of remote sensing data, to geographers interested in identifying the role of green and blue water in agricultural production, and more generally to researchers interested in the impacts of rainfall and water availability on small-scale producers in the Brazilian Amazon.

Keywords: Climate change and poverty; Farmer production; Remote sensing data; Green and blue water; Brazilian Amazon; Water and agriculture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X21002229
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:wdevel:v:146:y:2021:i:c:s0305750x21002229

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105607

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().