Agricultural expansion and its impacts on climate change: evidence from Iran

Excessive concentration of greenhouse gases in atmosphere emitted from human activities has been considerably changing the world’s climate, especially in the last 50 years. Agriculture, as humans’ food production system, has undoubtedly interrelated with climate change (CC). During current decades, the impacts of CC on agriculture have been properly investigated; however, the impacts of agriculture on CC have received lower attention. This may be due to the scarcity of long-term spatiotemporal climatic and agricultural data to analyze coupling trends and interactions. Benefiting from a comprehensive database and using structural equation modeling, this study seeks to investigate the contribution of agriculture to CC in Iran for more than half a century. For this, two indicators were developed to evaluate structural characteristics of agricultural expansion (AEI) and CC at the province level. Then, the effect of AEI on CC was investigated using the structural equation modeling technique. The results showed that AEI has not had a positive contribution to raising the long-term average surface temperature. Precisely, the provinces with a higher level of surface temperature have had a lower AEI, indicating that other sectors outweigh agriculture in exacerbating long-term CC in the country. Nevertheless, Iran still needs to improve and sustain its agricultural practices and technologies. The main conclusion of this study is that if the government and policymakers aspire to manage CC, they should have a more holistic and systematic view. In other words, not only do they need to consider all drivers of CC, but they also have to pay close attention to the network of relationships among the drivers.