Impacts of climate change on agriculture: Evidence from China

To move China's climate policy forward, improved analyses of climate impacts on economic sectors using rigorous methodology and high quality data are called for. We develop an empirical framework, using fine-scale meteorological data, to estimate the link between corn and soy bean yields and weather in China. We find that (i) there are nonlinear and inverted U-shaped relationships between crop yields and weather variables; (ii) global warming has caused an economic loss of about $820 million to China's corn and soy bean sectors in the past decade; and (iii) corn and soy bean yields are projected to decline by 3–12% and 7–19%, respectively, by 2100.