Weather-shock and climate change impacts on Ethiopian and Nigerian farming households and their adaptive responses
Climate change is expected to impose substantial welfare costs on agrarian low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), yet credible microlevel estimates of its impacts on farm productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) remain limited. Existing economic studies typically rely on simplified weather metrics or macrolevel data, while agronomic experiments are unable to reflect the behavioural and institutional constraints facing smallholder farmers. This project addresses these gaps by combining georeferenced panel data from detailed household surveys from two major and contrasting countries in SSA with state-of-the-art rootzone soil moisture (RZSM) datasets and ensembles of Earth System Model (ESM) simulations.
The first objective is to estimate nonlinear crop yield responses to soil moisture deficits, temperature extremes, and their interaction using statistical models that take account of time invariant farm characteristics and other contemporaneous shocks. The second objective applies these estimated response functions to climate model projections under IPCC SSP scenarios to quantify long run productivity impacts of anthropogenic climate change through the twenty-first century, explicitly incorporating uncertainty across climate and hydrological ensembles. A compound stress approach is used to capture the joint distribution of heat and moisture conditions that drive economically meaningful yield losses.
The third objective examines households’ adaptive responses to weather induced crop-yield shocks, including adjustments in crop portfolios, input use, land allocation, and off farm labour supply. By integrating advances in climate science with micro econometric identification, the project will generate new, policy relevant evidence on the mechanisms through which climate variability affects smallholder production and adaptation behaviour in SSA.