Growing evidence suggests that climate change will have significant negative effects on agricultural productivity across many highly concentrated production regions. Much empirical analysis has begun to focus on both short‐ and long‐run adaptation within these regions. US sorghum production has received relatively less attention than other commonly grown grains, such as corn and wheat, despite that it is one of the top five grains grown in the US and ranks in the top ten of all crops grown globally. We match farm‐level yield outcomes with fine‐scale gridded weather data to generate a panel of Kansas sorghum producers totaling 45,971 observations spread across 7,298 farms and thirty‐eight years. Fixed effects regressions leverage substantial cross‐sectional and temporal variation in yields and weather to estimate the effect of warming temperatures on yields. Results suggest that sorghum is quite sensitive to warming temperatures—as moderate increases of 2°C in growing season temperatures lead to an average 24% reduction in yields—thereby raising doubts about its potential for offsetting climate change impacts relative to other crops. We also consider whether warming impacts can be lessened through growing season adjustments and find very little support for this form of adaptation. A cross‐sectional identification approach that encapsulates additional forms of adaptation also finds limited adaptation potential for sorghum producers. As a possible upside, we find evidence that sorghum's ability to withstand extreme heat has decreased by 70% over time, suggesting that there might exist currently outdated production practices and/or seed varieties that could help offset warming impacts.
The Twenty-First Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held in Paris in December 2015, resulted in 195 countries making voluntary greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction pledges, called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). In a departure from their previous positions, many low-and middle-income (LMI) countries made substantial pledges to mitigate and sequester GHGs. However, the limited financial, technological, and institutional capacity of these countries raises challenges for the attainment of their COP21 pledges. Several approaches have been proposed to overcome these barriers to climate policy in LMI countries. The first is direct financial or technology transfers, including use of the Green
The Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21), held in Paris in December 2015, resulted in voluntary greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction pledges, independent of each other, by 195 countries. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the equity implications of this "bottom-up" approach to climate change negotiations in two major ways. First we analyze the GHG reduction targets specified in the COP21 agreement prior to any emissions trading in terms of the Gini Coefficient equity metric. We also compare the pledges with specific equity principles proposed by developing countries for many years, such as the Egalitarian and Ability to Pay equity. Second, we analyze the equity outcomes after emissions trading takes place for a sample of countries/regions. We find that international policy coordination through a system of tradable GHG emissions allowances can greatly lower the cost to all participants of reducing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. An emissions trading system involving all countries and regions that made unconditional pledges at COP21 could reduce total GHG mitigation costs from an estimated $1.71 trillion to $0.4 trillion (in 2015 dollars), a savings of 77%. The ensuing allowance sales revenues would greatly enhance the capability of lower-income countries to meet their COP21 pledges. Moreover, the cost-savings in high-income countries would facilitate contributions to the promised fund of $100 billion per year to assist climate policy implementation in low-income countries.
While post-disaster migration can move vulnerable populations from dangerous regions to relatively safe ones, little is known about decisions that migrants use to select new homes. We develop an econometric model of migrant flows to examine the characteristics of the destinations that attracted migrants leaving the New Orleans area following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 relative to migration behaviors in other years. We find an increased flow of migrants to large, nearby counties with a mixed effect of economic variables on migration. We find that counties that had experienced fewer disasters received a greater proportion of total migrants in 2005, but there was an overall increase in migration flow to disaster-prone regions as well.
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