Progress 10/01/20 to 09/30/21
Outputs
Target Audience: The target audience include academic scholars (through publication of peer review publications) and the general population (through new reports). Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Project allowed training of a graduate student (through RAship) in data processing and techniquesnecessary to carry out econometric analysis of climate change impacts on agriculture. The project also allowed me to write a chapter for the handbook of agricultural economics focused on the empirical analysis of climate change impacts. That chapter comes with reproducible code allowing new researchers and graduate students beyond Cornell to bend the learning curve and conduct their own studies of climate change impacts on agriculture and other sectors of the economy. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Yes, the results of the studies conducted under the project have been disseminated widely. The 2021 paper in Nature Climate Change has been accessed more than 14,000 times (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01000-1). According to Almetric thatarticle is in the 99thpercentile (ranked 262nd) of the 325,464 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals and the 96thpercentile (ranked 3rd) of the 65 tracked articles of a similar age inNature Climate Change.In addition, the code for that paper has been downloaded more than 600 times (https://archive.ciser.cornell.edu/reproduction-packages/2840). The code for the handbook chapter (that is not yet published)has been downloaded 272 times (https://archive.ciser.cornell.edu/reproduction-packages/2856). This is mostly graduate students and other researchers seeking to conduct work on the analysis of climate change impacts on various sectors of the economy. I anticipate this will continue to disseminate for several years. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?This is the end of this project. I have ongoing work very much in line with this multi-state and I anticipate to request a renewal for the multi-state project.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
The project improved our understanding of how United States (US) agriculture is changing in response to a changing climate. The project determined that despite major improvements in US ag productivity (as measured by Total Factor Productivity of TFP), extreme weather events (particularly high temperature) are becoming increasingly damaging. This is particularly the case for Midwestern agriculture. The project also established the historical impact of anthropogenic climate change on global agricultural productivity. This is the first study of its nature and sets the foundations for more targeted work aimed at improving ways of making global agriculture more resilient to a warming climate. The project also allowed me to work on an important handbook chapter aimed at junior researchers and graduate students doing empirical work in the analysis of climate change impacts on agriculture. The project led to multiple publications, presentations, media interviews and student training opportunities.
Publications
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Awaiting Publication
Year Published:
2021
Citation:
Ortiz-Bobea, Ariel (2021), "The empirical analysis of climate change impacts and adaptation in agriculture", Handbook of Agricultural Economics.
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Progress 10/01/19 to 09/30/20
Outputs
Target Audience: The target audience include academic scholars (through publication of peer review publications) and the general population(through new reports). Changes/Problems:We were not able to obtain the research and development (R&D) data from another research group at University of Minnesota. As a result we could not conduct analysis on the returns to R&D. We are still insisting or in the process of building that dataset ourselves with funds from another grant. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?
Nothing Reported
How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? This work has been presented at: 2020 Summer meetings of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE) Cornell Department of Natural Resources (9/15/2020) Michigan State University (9/24/2020) VIII Catedra de Economia del Caribe, Universidad del Norte (Colombia, online). October 30 2020 University of Connecticut (Econ, online), November 9 2020 Virginia Tech (AAEC, online), November 18 2020 UC Berkeley (ARE, online), November 19 2020 Oregon State University (Applied Economics, online), November 20 2020 AERE@SEA (online), November 22 2020 AGU (online), December 8 2020 Auburn University (AERS, online), April 19 2021 The work was also covered in the news, including The Guardian, and Blomberg. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
1. State the issue in terms that will connect with a broad audience. Think back to what need you were seeking to address when you proposed the project. The global climate is changing and it is unclear to what extent is has already affected agricultural production at a global scale.Understanding these historical impacts will help assess the urgency of renewed investments in Research and Development (R&D) in agriculture. 2. Describe, in general terms, who did what, and the results. Specific quantitative values or trends help validate the impact. To answer this question I conducted an analysis with the help of a graduate student and in collaboration with climate scientists at Cornell and colleagues at University of Maryland and Stanford University. Our global studies analyzed the effect of human influences on the climate system on the historical growth of agricultural productivity at a global scale. We found that from 1961 to 2020 productivity increased but anthropogenic climate change slowed that growth by about 20% globally. This is equivalent to losing about 7 years of productivity growth over the 60 years period of the study. We also found that agriculture is becoming increasingly sensitive to higher temperatures, suggesting that technological progress has not translated to more climate resilience (at least not yet) at a global scale. 3. Translate those results into broader outcomes in the real world. Engage your peripheral vision in order to remember how the work you are doing is important to the bigger picture and then explain that simply and directly. What this means is that anthropogenic climate change has reduced our ability to produce more agricultural products with the same inputs. Another way to view this, is that it takes now more inputs, like land, fertilizer, capital and labor, to produce what we could have produced without anthropogenic climate change. More inputs means potential more deforestation and water pollution. Given the trends observed about rising sensitivity to high temperature over time, and the projection of even higher temperatures in future decades, our work raises awareness about the need to boost agricultural research aimed at more climate resilient agricultural technologies.
Publications
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2021
Citation:
Ortiz-Bobea, Ariel, Toby R. Ault, Carlos M. Carrillo, Robert G. Chambers, and David B. Lobell. "Anthropogenic climate change has slowed global agricultural productivity growth." Nature Climate Change 11, no. 4 (2021): 306-312.
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2021
Citation:
Plastina, A., Lence, S. H., & Ortiz?Bobea, A. (2021). How weather affects the decomposition of total factor productivity in US agriculture. Agricultural Economics, 52(2), 215-234.
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2020
Citation:
Ortiz?Bobea, A. (2020). The role of nonfarm influences in Ricardian estimates of climate change impacts on US agriculture. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 102(3), 934-959.
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Progress 10/01/18 to 09/30/19
Outputs
Target Audience: The target audience include academic scholars and the general population (through journalists). Changes/Problems:The PI has worked 3.5 months on this project. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Similar to our previous article,a graduate student was involved in the research and learned new statistical/econometric techniques for estimating nonlinear effects of weather on economic outcomes. The student will be applying similar technique to his own projects. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? This work has been presented at the summer meetings of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE) and in various seminars at Cornell (Dyson and Digital Ag seminar), Arizona State andUniversity of Arizona. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?Two main activities: Work to publish this paper. The paper was sent for review but was ultimately rejected from Nature. We are not preparing a revision to submit to Science. If rejected there, we would then submitto PNAS, and then to more specialized Nature journals (Nature Climate Change, Nature Sustainability or Nature Food). Launch a similar analysis (assessing historical impact of anthropogenic climate change on agricultural productivity) on US agriculture. The global project does not allow a nuanced understanding of the effects on US agriculture given that the analysis is done at a country-level resolution. Launch a new global analysis assessing the research and development (R&D) investment needs to counter balance the future projected impacts of anthropogenic climate change on global agricultural productivity.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
The research primarily consisted on an econometric analysis of country-level measures of total factor productivity (TFP) put together by the USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) for 1961-2015. We linked these measures of TFP with detailed weather data from the Princeton'sGlobal Meteorological Forcing Dataset (GMFD) for land surface modeling (https://hydrology.princeton.edu/data.pgf.php). We estimated regression models of TFP on weather variables to quantify the sensitivity of global agricultural productivityto temperature and precipitation changes. We performed various tests to compare whether those climatic sensitivities have evolved over time. We thencombined this econometric model with data fromcounterfactual climate experiments fromGeneral Circulation Models (GCM) to derive the trajectory of global TFP growth with an without anthropogenic climate change since 1961. The goal is to quantify the growth (or slowdown) in global agricultural TFP that may be attributable to anthropogenic climate chance. The analysis reflects two sources of uncertainty: climate uncertainty associated with the influence of human emissions on the climate system (embodied in differences across variousGCMs) and statistical uncertainty associated with the econometric model linking TFP growth and weather fluctuations.We capture the statistical uncertainty by estimating the regression model via a bootstrap whereby full years of data are sampled with replacement. To jointly account for these uncertainties we randomly sample bootstrap estimates from the econometric model with randomly drawn weather trajectories from the various GCMs. Weconsidered more than 200 variations of the econometric model (based on alternative temperature variables, with/without precipitation, with a quadratic or cubic functional form, with a globally or regionally-estimated response function, with various regression weights, with various aggregation weights for the weather data, with various definitions of the growing season, with various temporal and country exclusions, etc.). The research conducted shows that anthropogenic climate change has reduced global agricultural productivity by about 13% since 1961, a slowdown equivalent to losing the past 7 years of productivity growth over a sixty year period (1961-2020). The average of alternative models indicate that the reduction is about 17%, so our baseline model could be underestimating the impact.We also find that global agriculture is growingincreasingly sensitive to ongoing climate change (similar to our recent findings in US agriculture), further eroding productivity growth in recent decades.Impacts are much larger in the tropics, particularly in Africa and Latin America.This is a new finding. Previous research has overwhelmingly focused on cereals crops, which constitutes only about 20% of value produced globally. Our study focused on 100% of agricultural production. The It is unclear the source of what is driving our findings so further research is needed.But we now have quantitative evidence of the *historical* influence of anthropogenic climate change on global agricultural productivity.
Publications
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Submitted
Year Published:
2019
Citation:
The historical impact of anthropogenic climate change on global agricultural productivity
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Progress 10/01/17 to 09/30/18
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience include academic scholars and the general population (through journalists). Changes/Problems:The PI worked 1.5 months over this reporting period. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?A graduate student was involved in the research and learned new statistical/econometric techniques for estimating nonlinear effects of weather on economic outcomes. The student (now graduated) will be able to apply these skills to other problems. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Although results are not yet disseminated, the intention is to raise awareness about the changing climatic sensitivity of US agriculture to the general population as well as policy-makers through the media. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?With a PhD student, I plan to analyze the climatic drivers ofcrop failure in US agriculture using statistical approaches.Little work has been done in this area and this new knowledge will help improve our understanding of the emerging climatic risks facing US agriculture.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
The research primarily consisted on an econometric analysis of state-level measures of total factor productivity (TFP) put together by the USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) for 1960-2004. We linked these measures of TFP with detailed weather data from PRISM (http://www.prism.oregonstate.edu ) which we aggregated up to different seasons (spring, summer, fall, winter) and over the cropland areas for each state. We estimated regression models of TFP on weather variables to quantify the sensitivity of regional agricultural production to climatic variations. The analysis was performed for every USDA Climate Hub region in the continental US. We quantified how much productivity is affected by temperature and precipitation deviations (e.g. +2C, or +30% precipitation) for an earlier period (pre 1980s) and a more recent period (since 1980s). We performed various tests to compare whether those climatic sensitivities have evolved over time. We also analyzed changes in climatic sensitivities for crop and livestock output, milk production and hay yields, as well as measures of aggregate input, to obtain deeper insights into the potential drivers of the observed changes in the climatic sensitivity of US agricultural TFP. We capture the uncertainty of our results by estimating the regression model via a bootstrap whereby full years of data are sampled with replacement for each climate hub region. The research conducted shows that US agriculture is growing increasingly sensitive to climate in certain cores areas, particularly in the US Midwest. This is a new finding. In the context of this research, we also identify the causes, which we attribute to: 1- the growing specialization in crop production in the Midwest, and 2- the growing climatic sensitivity of crop production in the Midwest. We now have a better sense of how changes in climate could affect future trends in agricultural productivity across the nation and why.
Publications
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Accepted
Year Published:
2018
Citation:
Ortiz-Bobea A, Knippenberg E, Chambers RG (2018) Growing sensitivity of U.S. agriculture linked to technological change and regional specialization. Science Advances. Accepted
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Progress 11/04/16 to 09/30/17
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience is the broad research and policy communities dealing with the overall progress in agricultural technologies and focusing on improving the resilience of US agriculture to climate change. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?The GRA acquired skills in econometric modeling of nonlinear temperatureeffects on economic outcomes by working closely (one-on-one) with the projectPI. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?At this stage, work has been presented at the American Association of Applied and Agricultural Economics (AAEA) in the summer of 2017. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?During the next reporting period the team aims to compare how transformations of US agriculture compare relative to that of countriesin terms of improving its resiliency to climate change. This will involve a global comparative analysis of country-level agricultural sectors and how their respective sensitivities have evolved over time.This is an ambitious project. If the project advances faster than anticipated resources would be allocated to conduct more large-scale county-levelanalyses.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
The project team conducted research showing that growth in US agricultural productivity over the past several decades hasinadvertently increase the sector's sensitivity to climatic shocks. This is a new finding that is relevant for US policy making (Farm Bill) and for climate change adaptation. The paper is currently under review at Nature Sustainability.
Publications
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