IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fem/femwpa/2017.41.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Simulated vs. Empirical Weather Responsiveness of Crop Yields: U.S. Evidence and Implications for the Agricultural Impacts of Climate Change

Author

Listed:
  • Malcolm N. Mistry

    (Università Ca' Foscari, FEEM and CMCC)

  • Ian Sue Wing

    (Boston University)

  • Enrica De Cian

    (FEEM and CMCC)

Abstract

Global gridded crop models (GGCMs) are the workhorse of assessments of the agricultural impacts of climate change. Yet the changes in crop yields projected by different models in response to the same meteorological forcing can differ substantially. Through an inter-method comparison, we provide a first glimpse into the origins and implications of this divergence—both among GGCMs and between GGCMs and historical observations. We examine yields of rainfed maize, wheat, and soybeans simulated by six GGCMs as part of the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project-Fast Track (ISIMIP-FT) exercise, comparing 1981-2004 hindcast yields over the coterminous United States (U.S.) against U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) time series for about 1,000 counties. Leveraging the empirical climate change impacts literature, we estimate reduced-form econometric models of crop yield responses to temperature and precipitation exposures for both GGCMs and observations. We find that up to 60% of the variance in both simulated and observed yields is attributable to weather variation. Majority of the GGCMs have difficulty reproducing the observed distribution of percentage yield anomalies, and exhibit aggregate responses that show yields to be more weather-sensitive than in the observational record over the predominant range of temperature and precipitation conditions. This disparity is largely attributable to heterogeneity in GGCMs’ responses, as opposed to uncertainty in historical weather forcings, and is responsible for widely divergent impacts of climate on future crop yields.

Suggested Citation

  • Malcolm N. Mistry & Ian Sue Wing & Enrica De Cian, 2017. "Simulated vs. Empirical Weather Responsiveness of Crop Yields: U.S. Evidence and Implications for the Agricultural Impacts of Climate Change," Working Papers 2017.41, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei.
  • Handle: RePEc:fem:femwpa:2017.41
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://feem-media.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/NDL2017-041.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Tianyi Zhang & Yong He & Ron DePauw & Zhenong Jin & David Garvin & Xu Yue & Weston Anderson & Tao Li & Xin Dong & Tao Zhang & Xiaoguang Yang, 2022. "Climate change may outpace current wheat breeding yield improvements in North America," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 13(1), pages 1-9, December.
    2. Francesco Reyes & Marie Gosme & Kevin J. Wolz & Isabelle Lecomte & Christian Dupraz, 2021. "Alley Cropping Mitigates the Impacts of Climate Change on a Wheat Crop in a Mediterranean Environment: A Biophysical Model-Based Assessment," Agriculture, MDPI, vol. 11(4), pages 1-18, April.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Climate Change Impacts; Crop Yields; Global Gridded Crop Models; ISI-MIP;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • Q1 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture
    • Q5 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fem:femwpa:2017.41. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Alberto Prina Cerai (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/feemmit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.