This paper quantifies the economic effects of climate change on Turkey. We use an integrated framework that combines an economy-wide model with a crop water requirement model to analyse the probable effects of the B1 scenario of the intergovernmental panel on climate change which is comparable to representative concentration pathway 4.5 scenario. Results suggest that the economic effects of climate change will not have serious economic effects over the period up to late 2030s, but the negative effects dominate the economy in the second half of this century. This provides Turkey an excellent opportunity to increase resilience and implement appropriate adaptation policies. The impact of climate change varies across regions. Agriculture and food production will be heavily affected. Especially irrigated production will decline as water stress increases. Significant decline in agricultural production is transmitted throughout the economy and reduces national welfare. Part of agriculture's decline is compensated by imports, thus deteriorating Turkey's food trade balance.

The extent to which agricultural trade liberalisation can be an adaptation strategy in the face of climate change remains to be an open discussion in the literature. We set out to answer this question in the context of Morocco and Turkey by taking into account the impact of climate change on agricultural international markets at the global level. We use the GTAP model, combined with a newly developed global database on climate change impacts on agricultural crop sectors by 2050 as captured by yield projections. Results suggest that the more trade is liberalised, the higher global welfare gains are. However, the gains are not large enough to offset the loss from climate change impacts on agricultural productivity globally. In Morocco, agricultural trade liberalisation, on average, induces additional welfare losses. The main drivers are the deterioration in the terms of trade that offsets all the potential gains from the better allocation of economic resources due to free trade. For Turkey, trade liberalisation induces net welfare gains under all scenarios. The larger the tariff elimination scheme, the larger the net gains due to the more efficient allocation of economic resources, which partially offset the impact of declining terms of trade.

This paper is a product of the project "Macro-Micro Feedback Links of Irrigation Water Management", funded by the Research Committee of World Bank and managed by DECRG-RU. We are indebted to Ariel Dinar advice and comments. Constructive review comments from Erinc Yeldan are acknowledged with appreciation. Cakmak, Dudu, Saracoglu, Roe and Tsur were consultans to the World Bank on this study.

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