{"id":6760,"date":"2015-11-22T08:17:00","date_gmt":"2015-11-22T08:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=6760"},"modified":"2015-11-22T08:17:00","modified_gmt":"2015-11-22T08:17:00","slug":"grow-your-own-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/grow-your-own-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Grow your own way"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trade may not help a warming planet fight its farming failures. \u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A group of Burmese woman grow rice on a rice paddy. A new study indicates that agriculture in Mynamar and other countries will experience substantial productivity declines in the next 30 years due to climate change.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.<\/strong> —\u00a0Warming temperatures will take a heavy toll on agricultural productivity, according to climate scientists. How will society adjust? One possibility might be increased trade: If one country suffers a decline in, say, wheat production but can still grow as much rice as ever, then \u2014 in theory \u2014 it might grow more rice and trade for its usual amount of wheat instead.<\/span><\/p>\n

[pullquote]The research uses an unusually detailed dataset that divides the Earth\u2019s surface into 1.7 million grid zones and looks at agricultural output within them.[\/pullquote]<\/p>\n

But a new study co-authored by an MIT economist suggests that international trade will do little to alleviate climate-induced farming problems. Instead, the report indicates that countries will have to alter their own patterns of crop production to lessen farming problems \u2014 and even then, there will be significant net losses in production under the basic scenarios projected by climate scientists. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe key is the response within a country, in terms of what those farmers produce, rather than between countries,\u201d says Arnaud Costinot, a professor in the Department of Economics at MIT and expert on international trade issues, who is one of the authors of a paper detailing the study\u2019s results.<\/span><\/p>\n

To be sure, the study concludes that the overall impact of climate change on farming is expected to be large: Even with adjustments in both farming practices and trade, farming production would decline by roughly one-sixth, using the baseline scenario for climate change projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and incorporating weather projections over a 30-year period.<\/span><\/p>\n

The research uses an unusually detailed dataset that divides the Earth\u2019s surface into 1.7 million grid zones and looks at agricultural output within them. It examines 10 crops, including wheat and rice, which represent about 1.8 percent of global GDP. The damage to those crops alone would lower global GDP by about 0.3 percent.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis is pretty substantial,\u201d Costinot says. He adds that because the 10 crops in the study represent only a portion of global farming, this predicted reduction in their share of global GDP means that when it comes to assessing the damage to agricultural productivity overall, the decrease of one-sixth \u201cis really the right number to have in mind.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Eleven scenarios, one common pattern<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The paper detailing the study has been published in the latest issue of the\u00a0Journal of Political Economy<\/em>. The co-authors of the study are Costinot; Dave Donaldson, an economist at Stanford University who helped conduct the research while at MIT; and Cory Smith, a doctoral student in economics at MIT.<\/span><\/p>\n

The study uses information from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which compiles a dataset on \u201cGlobal Agro-Ecological Zones.\u201d The dataset looks at factors such as soil, topography, and elevation, in conjunction with climate conditions.<\/span><\/p>\n

The researchers then built a model of agricultural production and international trade, involving 50 countries that comprise about 90 percent of the world\u2019s farming output. They applied the model\u2019s results to 11 different climate scenarios described by the IPCC, the UN group that has published a series of consensus climate forecasts.<\/span><\/p>\n

To get their final results, Costinot, Donaldson, and Smith modeled what would happen if farmers could not change the crops they produce, as well as what would happen if countries could not change their patterns of trade.<\/span><\/p>\n

Crucially, across all 11 of the climate scenarios, the researchers found that internal changes in the types of crops grown were always more important than using global trade as a way of compensating for farming failures.<\/span><\/p>\n

When farmers in the model were unable to make crop changes, Costinot observes, \u201cHalf the value of the output would have been gone, suggesting that that adjustment was pretty important. In contrast, when we turn to the international trade channel, we found something very close to the original effects [of climate change on farming], suggesting that that adjustment is far less important.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As with many aspects of climate change, the effects on agriculture could vary widely by region and country. In the study\u2019s model \u2014 under the baseline IPCC scenario, and given farming and trade adjustments \u2014 agricultural productivity declined by over 10 percent in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, and Myanmar, and a whopping 49 percent in Malawi. In other countries, including Germany and the United States, the expected effects in the model were very modest.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s much, much larger for some countries, including the poorest countries in the world,\u201d Costinot observes.<\/span><\/p>\n

To be clear, as the researchers note, the study does depend on the consensus forecasts of the IPCC. \u201cWe\u2019re being very upfront that we just take that as input,\u201d Costinot says.<\/span><\/p>\n

The study received funding from the National Science Foundation.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New study co-authored by an MIT economist suggests that international trade will do little to alleviate climate-induced farming problems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":6761,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economics","category-research"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/MIT-Climate-Agriculture_0.jpg",448,299,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/MIT-Climate-Agriculture_0-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/MIT-Climate-Agriculture_0-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/MIT-Climate-Agriculture_0.jpg",448,299,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/MIT-Climate-Agriculture_0.jpg",448,299,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/MIT-Climate-Agriculture_0.jpg",448,299,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/MIT-Climate-Agriculture_0.jpg",448,299,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/MIT-Climate-Agriculture_0.jpg",448,299,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/MIT-Climate-Agriculture_0.jpg",448,299,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/MIT-Climate-Agriculture_0.jpg",448,299,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/MIT-Climate-Agriculture_0.jpg",448,299,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/MIT-Climate-Agriculture_0.jpg",448,299,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/MIT-Climate-Agriculture_0.jpg",448,299,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/MIT-Climate-Agriculture_0.jpg",95,63,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/MIT-Climate-Agriculture_0.jpg",448,299,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/MIT-Climate-Agriculture_0.jpg",96,64,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/MIT-Climate-Agriculture_0.jpg",150,100,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"Economics<\/a> Research<\/a>","tag_info":"Research","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6760\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}