Humans rely on agricultural products for their food. Agricultural production relies on soil, climate, agricultural inputs, and farmers. The importance of climate and soil inputs has been recently reconsidered in agricultural production. However, the quantification of the impact of climate change on agricultural production has been conducted mainly with regression methods that impose undesired assumptions on the obtained results. If it is true that climate is changing, an estimation of climate change impacts on agriculture free of undesired assumptions is the key to understanding a strategy towards a sustainable future. Going beyond the methodological approaches proposed in previous studies, in this action I bridge the gap between production economics and the agronomic and climate economics literature.
The first contribution of this action will merge farm accountancy datasets with climatic and soil characteristics at the most disaggregate geographical level possible (at least NUTS3 or smaller location) 3. The second contribution of this action will methodologically reconsider the impact of climate change on plant growth. I will integrate agronomic science in studying the economic impact of climate change on plant growth. Asymmetric night warming caused from climate change might represent an environment conducive to higher plant growth. In this contribution I will disaggregate the asymmetric increase in temperatures along the day and its potential impact on circadian plant rhythms. The third contribution of this action proposes a generalized decomposition method that, either with econometric or nonparametric methods, can attribute changes in productivity and profitability to different groups of inputs and outputs, among which are soil and climate inputs. The fourth contribution evaluates the production practices of the farmers and shows how much climatic and soil inputs are implicitly valued. This is the shadow value attributed from the producer to inputs that are not priced otherwise. This would result in a localized monetary evaluation in European agriculture of an additional degree of temperature or of an additional percentage unit of carbon.
The overall aim of this action is to create an innovative dataset and to methodologically re-characterise the impact of climate change on European Union farm-level production from 1990 to 2015.
