Understanding the extent to which agriculture can adapt to climate change and the determinants of farmers' adaptive capacity are of paramount importance from a policy perspective. Based on household survey data from a large sample in rural China, the present article adopts a panel approach to estimate the potential benefits of long-run adaptation and to identify the determinants of farmers' adaptive capacity. The empirical results suggest that, for various model settings and climate change scenarios, long-run adaptations should mitigate one-third to one-half of the damages of warming on crop profits by the end of this century. These findings support the basic argument of the hedonic approach that omitting long-run adaptations will dramatically overestimate the potential damage of climate change. The paper also finds that household-level capital intensity and farmland size have significant effects on farmers' adaptive capacities.
Huang, KX; Wang, JX; Huang, JK; Findlay, C
The potential benefits of agricultural adaptation to warming in China in the long run
Environment And Development Economics