The impact of temperature and precipitation on wheat production in Türkiye

It is now a well-known fact that climate is changing globally at an unprecedented rate and agriculture is one of the most vulnerable sectors to this change. Considered as a significant threat for food security, climate change and its impact on agricultural practices are among the most prominent topics in the recent economic literature. Given its significant contribution to employment, exports and national income, agricultural production-climate change relation is considerably crucial for the Turkish economy. In this paper, we investigate the impact of climate change on wheat production at the province-level with a unique, up-to-date and comprehensive dataset that is constructed by the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye (CBRT) under the Early Warning System Project (EWSP). In the corresponding models, climate change is initially considered in a conventional way via temperature and precipitation measures, later considered with new alternative composite climate indicators. The estimation results obtained from models with two different alternative climate measures are comparable and similar: Climate change has a statistically significant adverse impact on wheat production. Combining model estimation results with the climate scenarios, the impact of hotter springs and summers on wheat production for different time spans has been put forward. The impact is found to be increasing over time, regardless severity of the climate scenarios. We believe that our understanding regarding climate change-agricultural production relation will improve with the advancements of the data set, and this will support the development of more efficient policy recommendations.