Showing 1 - 10 of 428
Arid regions of Africa are expanding by thousands of square kilometers a year, potentially disturbing pastoral routes that have been forged over a long period of time. This disturbance is often said to explain why "herder-farmer" conflicts have erupted in recent years, as pastoralists and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012482461
Climate change increases weather variability, exacerbating agricultural risk in poor countries. Risk-averse farmers are unable to tailor their planting decisions to the coming season, and underinvest in profitable inputs. Accurate, long-range forecasts enable farmers to optimize for the season...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014486264
Starting in the 1930s, commercial hybrid corn seeds rapidly replaced the once predominant open-pollinated varieties planted by farmers. By the mid-1950s almost all corn grown in the United States was of hybrid varieties. Observers have argued that the drought tolerant qualities of these hybrids...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012481873
Extreme heat is the single best predictor of corn and soybean yields in the United States. While average yields have risen continuously since World War II, we find no evidence that relative tolerance to extreme heat has improved between 1950 and 2005. Climate change forecasts project a sharp...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012462349
The United States produces 41% of the world's corn and 38% of the world's soybeans, so any impact on US crop yields will have implications for world food supply. We pair a panel of county-level crop yields in the US with a fine-scale weather data set that incorporates the whole distribution of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012464847
We investigate the short- and long-term effects of a natural gas boom in an economy where energy can be produced with coal, natural gas, or clean sources and the direction of technology is endogenous. In the short run, a natural gas boom reduces carbon emissions by inducing substitution away...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014372414
Climate change is generating demonstrable harm around the world. Political and legal efforts have sought to associate climate impacts with specific emissions, including in recent international policy discussion of Loss and Damage (L&D). However, no quantitative definition of L&D exists, nor does...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014372415
Quantifying factors giving rise to temporal variation in forest fires is important for advancing scientific understanding and improving fire prevention. We demonstrate that eighty percent of the large year-to-year variation in forest area burned in California can be accounted for by variation in...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014372495
This paper shows that unilateral decarbonization pays for itself in large economies. We estimate economic damages from global temperature shocks and combine them with a climate-economy model to construct Domestic Costs of Carbon: $226 per ton for the United States and $216 per ton for the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10015195010
We quantify the U.S. corporate sector's carbon externality by computing the sector's "carbon burden"--the present value of social costs of its future carbon emissions. Our baseline estimate of the carbon burden is 131% of total corporate equity value. Among individual firms, 77% have carbon...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10015145061