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GTAP Resources: Resource Display

GTAP Resource #5063

"Global food and environmental impacts under climate change: An application of gridded agricultural economic modelling"
by Baldos, Uris Lantz


Abstract
Agricultural economic models are indispensable in the analysis of broad issues affecting the farm-food-environment nexus. Many of these models have been designed accordingly to accommodate country and/or regional-level data – for example trade and economic data from the GTAP database as well as agricultural production data from UN FAO. However, it is becoming evident that agricultural economic models are far too aggregated for the analysis of localized agro-climatic issues that have broad consequences on the global farm and food system. This is particularly true for climate change. Climate-driven crop yield projections from gridded crop and climate models are quite heterogeneous within and across countries. Instead of using these refined projections, researchers are constrained to impose weighting methods to accommodate aggregations in existing agricultural economic models.

In this paper, we illustrate the advantages and challenges of using downscaled global model of agriculture using the gridded SIMPLE model. SIMPLE has been designed to capture the key drivers and economic responses at work in driving long run changes in the global farm and food system. We take advantage of SIMPLE’s flexibility and develop a gridded version of the model wherein crop production activities are defined at the geo-spatial level allowing us to downscale crop production from 16 regions to ~50,000 half-degree grid cells. In our preliminary work, we find that the aggregated climate change yield impacts are quite sensitive to aggregation methods. Yield impacts calculated from global averages are far milder than those from regional averages. Using gridded yield impacts offer different results on global crop production and cropland use in contrast to those generated given global and regionally aggregated yield impacts. However, caution should be exercised when using gridded projections as these inputs often include extreme outcomes.


Resource Details (Export Citation) GTAP Keywords
Category: 2016 Conference Paper
Status: Published
By/In: Presented at the 19th Annual Conference on Global Economic Analysis, Washington DC, USA
Date: 2016
Version:
Created: Baldos, U. (4/15/2016)
Updated: Baldos, U. (4/15/2016)
Visits: 1,325
- Climate impacts
- Land use
- Food prices and food security


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