Measuring adaptation in action: Uncovering agricultural land-use responses to changing yields and prices

Climate change affects agriculture directly through crop yield losses and indirectly through changes in crop prices. Farmers need to adapt their land-use decisions to these changing conditions. These decisions are made in advance and under considerable uncertainty. The extent to which farmers adapt their crop area allocations to changing yields and prices remains unclear, particularly at the national scale. We present an approach for measuring the adaptedness of observed crop area allocations to changing yields and prices in terms of the number of hectares differing from an economically optimal cropping pattern. We demonstrate the approach in a case study in Germany (1999–2020). To identify economically optimal crop area allocations under changing yields and prices, we employ an econometric mathematical programming (EMP) approach within a multi-agent system modeling framework. Over the 20 years, we find persistent changes in crop area allocations averaging 36% ±4% of each district’s agricultural area. Of these changes, 43% improved the adaptedness to today’s yields and prices. We observe a trend of increasing adaptedness over time, though significantly lower in districts facing drought conditions. Adaptation, however, prevails both under drought and non-drought conditions. Our results suggest that the economic impacts of changing yields and prices play a significant role in shaping observed land-use patterns, with important implications for land-use dynamics under climate change. Our approach opens promising avenues for further research seeking to disentangle the drivers of land-use adaptation over time and to inform future policies aimed at supporting agricultural adaptation to increasing weather extremes and changing climatic conditions.