Anthropogenic climate change has slowed global agricultural productivity growth

  • Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, Toby R. Ault, Carlos M. Carrillo, Robert G. Chambers, David B. Lobell
This article was originally published in Nature.
Agricultural research has fostered productivity growth, but the historical influence of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) on that growth has not been quantified. We develop a robust econometric model of weather effects on global agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) and combine this model with counterfactual climate scenarios to evaluate impacts of past climate trends on TFP. Our baseline model indicates that ACC has reduced global agricultural TFP by about 21% since 1961, a slowdown that is equivalent to losing the last 7 years of productivity growth. The effect is substantially more severe (a reduction of ~26–34%) in warmer regions such as Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean. We also find that global agriculture has grown more vulnerable to ongoing climate change.

Introduction

Enhancing agricultural productivity is vital to lifting global living standards and advancing sustainable food production in the face of escalating challenges to agriculture and the environment. Investments in agricultural research have boosted agricultural productivity, but this growth in productivity has been distributed unequally across the world, and there are signs that it is slowing in certain regions. At the same time, human activities during the last century and a half have caused global temperatures to rise by more than 1 °C above their pre-industrial values. This increase affects the global weather patterns that are essential to agriculture. However, the impacts of this ACC on the agricultural sector have not yet been quantified, as most research has focused on future impacts.

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