Abstract
A primary goal of studying climate change adaptation is to identify the adaptation options that are used to improve crop productivity or reduce the negative impacts of climate change. Many of the adjustments in farm management that farmers adopt do not necessarily represent true adaptations to climate change, an issue often ignored in existing literature and resulting in a risk that policy makers are misled to think that adaptation is easier than it actually is, and thereby underestimate the challenge that climate change presents. The overall goal of this study is to identify whether farmers’ adoptions are enhancing food production and adapting to climate change. The identification uses a plot-level panel from a survey of 619 rural households in three provinces in China and county-level weather data. With the use of plot and county-by-year fixed effects as well as instrumental variable approaches, our estimates show that the autonomous adoptions are not effective in improving crop yields. This implies that farmers’ adoptions cannot be always considered adaptations to climate change. The paper provides a possible explanation for the results and concludes with policy implications.
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Notes
We sampled the county based on drought or flood mainly for examining the impact of extreme events on agricultural production, which are not included in this paper. We believe that such sampling methods will not affect the results of this study.
In one of the selected counties in Qinghai Province, we added one more township as the county has more diversified agriculture.
This paper follows the approach of adaptation variable designing used in the Ethiopian paper of Di Falco et al. (2011). However, Di Falco et al. (2011) did not distinguish between the long run and the short-term adoptions and inputs. According to Eq. (1) below, we found that the distinction of these is vital for evaluating adaptation.
It is necessary to note that farmers in our samples planted double-season rice (early- and late-season rice) within a year. We treated rice as two crop types in data collection and controlled for the rice type (Dummy=1 if it is early-season rice and 0 otherwise) in the estimations.
1 mu equals 1/15 ha.
Although this approach has been widely used in other fields in the econometric literature, it is rarely applied in estimating the impact of adaptation to climate change.
As in Schlenker et al. (2006), we present the results using the GMM estimation, which is suitable to adjust the standard errors for spatial dependence and the heteroscedasticity of the error terms.
Only the situation of precipitation perception for maize yields is an exception.
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Funding
This research received financial support from the National Natural Sciences Foundation of China (71873148, 71503276, 71431006), Ministry of Education (16JZD013), and Sciences Foundation of Hunan in China (2016JJ3156, 16YBA362).
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Editor:Xiangzheng Deng.
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Wang, Y., Chen, X. Are farmers’ adaptations enhancing food production? Evidence from China. Reg Environ Change 18, 2183–2196 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-018-1410-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-018-1410-y