Climate change is one of the most important challenges facing the world in general and Africa in particular. This article examines economic costs of climate change and climate finance with a focus on Africa.
This paper examines the impact of climate change on poor households across South Africa who practice subsistence farming to supplement their household income and dietary requirements. We consider three production systems: specialized crops, livestock and mixed crop-livestock farming.
Weather fluctuations tend to be as important as climate change in farmers’ decision making in countries such as Ethiopia that have virtually no weather insurance. This paper assesses the distinct impacts of weather and climate change measures on agricultural productivity of households, measured in terms of crop revenue, in the Amhara region of Ethiopia.
Financial insurance for extreme events can play an important role in hedging against the implications of climate change. This paper combines a comprehensive estimation strategy and a unique panel dataset to study the role of financial insurance in farmers' welfare under uncertainty.
This paper provides the first county-level analysis of the impacts of weather variability on rice yield in China, by compiling a unique panel on irrigated single-season rice and daily weather data. We found that temperature and solar radiation had statistically significant impacts on rice yield during the vegetative and ripening stages, while the effects of rainfall on yield were not significant.
Climate change in Ethiopia will not only increase rainfall variability and lead to more frequent droughts and higher risk of rain generated floods, it will also continue to intensify the degradation
On 31 March, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report on the impacts of climate change on humans and ecosystems (see go.nature.com/ad5v1b). These are real risks that need to be accounted for in planning for adaptation and mitigation. Pricing the risks with integrated models of physics and economics lets their costs be compared to those of limiting climate change or investing in greater resilience.
In this paper, after a review of the evolution of the literature on climate change economics in agriculture, I present some evidence of the impact of different moments of the distribution of rainfall on farmers risk aversion.
It is found that while more rainfall is negatively associated with the probability of observing risk aversion, rainfall variability is positively correlated. This result highlights an important behavioural dimension of climatic factors.
This study investigates the impact of climate change adaptation on farm households’ downside risk exposure in the Nile Basin of Ethiopia. The analysis relies on a moment-based specification of the stochastic production function. We use an empirical strategy that accounts for the heterogeneity in the decision on whether to adapt or not, and for unobservable characteristics of farmers and their farm.
Except for the lowlands and pastoralist areas, mixed crop-livestock farming is the dominant farming type in Ethiopia. However, there have been few attempts to look into the economic impacts of climate change in the context of Ethiopia. Particularly, the role of livestock was disregarded in the previous studies.