Farmers need to adapt crops to climate change to stay profitable, experts say

“Without any changes in what farmers are currently planting, the total profits across the six major crops we looked at in the United States would drop by about 30%,” said James Rising, a research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and a researcher with the Climate Impact Lab. His work was published in Nature Communications.

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Crop switching reduces agricultural losses from climate change in the United States by half under RCP 8.5

Rising, J., Devineni, N. Crop switching reduces agricultural losses from climate change in the United States by half under RCP 8.5. Nat Commun 11, 4991 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18725-w

A key strategy for agriculture to adapt to climate change is by switching crops and relocating crop production. We develop an approach to estimate the economic potential of crop reallocation using a Bayesian hierarchical model of yields. We apply the model to six crops in the United States, and show that it outperforms traditional empirical models under cross-validation.

Published October 5, 2020

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