Baum, Z., Palatnik, R. R., Kan, I., & Rapaport-Rom, M. (2016). Economic Impacts of Water Scarcity Under Diverse Water Salinities. Water Econs. Policy, 02(01), 1550013.
Abstract: Exploitation of alternative water sources is expected to grow in the decades to come in water-stressed countries with fast population growth, especially in regions where a further decline of natural freshwater availability is expected due to climate change. Increasing utilization of non-freshwater usually leads to salinity build-up in fields and water sources as well as accumulation of various pollutants — both having a considerable impact on the suitability of non-freshwater for irrigation due to constraints associated with crop salinity tolerance and food safety regulations. We developed a linked Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) — farm-level model of a water economy with representation for multiple water types characterized by different qualities. We employ the model to assess the impact of water shortage on the Israeli economy, where steadily growing water scarcity leads to an increasing utilization of alternative water sources. We simulate water shortage scenarios based on the Long Term National Master Plan for The Water Economy developed by the Israeli Water Authority (IWA). The linked CGE — farm-level model provides a mechanism for estimating the Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) rates between different irrigation water types used in agriculture. This mechanism accounts for the effects of salinity on yields and takes into consideration food safety regulations for irrigating crops with treated wastewater. We demonstrate that, in contrast to previous studies, CES rates between different water types are not identical. The CES rates obtained in our study have relatively low values, which can be attributed to the constraints associated with crop salinity tolerance and food safety regulations. Our results reveal that water shortage can lead to a significant decline of Israel’s GDP, where a considerable part of the decline is attributed to the decrease in agricultural outputs. The magnitude of the impact depends on the underlying assumptions regarding future desalination capacity. To further study the effect of desalination, we run simulations under various desalination levels and examine its impact on the GDP. We also examine the extent to which the impact of water shortage is sensitive to CES rates between different irrigation water types.
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Bojar, W., Knopik, L., Żarski, J., & Kuśmierek-Tomaszewska, R. (2016). Integrated assessment of crop productivity based on the food supply forecasting. Agricultural Economics – Czech, 61(11), 502–510.
Abstract: Climate change scenarios suggest that long periods without rainfall will occur in the future often causing instability of the agricultural products market. The aim of our research was to build a model describing the amount of precipitation and droughts for forecasting crop yields in the future. In this study, we analysed a non-standard mixture of gamma and one point distributions as the model of rainfall. On the basis of the rainfall data, one can estimate parameters of the distribution. Parameter estimators were constructed using a method of maximum likelihood. The obtained rainfall data allow confirming the hypothesis of the adequacy of the proposed rainfall models. Long series of droughts allow one to determine the probabilities of adverse phenomena in agriculture. Based on the model, yields of barley in the years 2030 and 2050 were forecasted which can be used for the assessment of other crops productivity. The results obtained with this approach can be used to predict decreases in agricultural production caused by prospective rainfall shortages. This will enable decision makers to shape effective agricultural policies in order to learn how to balance the food supplies and demands through an appropriate management of stored raw food materials and import/export policies.
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Ventrella, D. (2016). Durum wheat yield and protein stability depending on residue management in a long term experiment in Southern Italy Edinburgh. Proceeding of ESA 14 – Growing landscapes – Cultivating innovative agricultural systems. Edinburgh (UK).
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Yang, H., Dobbie, S., Ramirez-Villegas, J., Feng, K., Challinor, A. J., Chen, B., et al. (2016). Potential negative consequences of geoengineering on crop production: A study of Indian groundnut. Geophys. Res. Let., 43(22), 11786–11795.
Abstract: Geoengineering has been proposed to stabilize global temperature, but its impacts on crop production and stability are not fully understood. A few case studies suggest that certain crops are likely to benefit from solar dimming geoengineering, yet we show that geoengineering is projected to have detrimental effects for groundnut. Using an ensemble of crop-climate model simulations, we illustrate that groundnut yields in India undergo a statistically significant decrease of up to 20% as a result of solar dimming geoengineering relative to RCP4.5. It is somewhat reassuring, however, to find that after a sustained period of 50 years of geoengineering crop yields return to the nongeoengineered values within a few years once the intervention is ceased.
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Blanco-Penedo et al. (2016). Data driven dairy decision for farmers (Vol. 8).
Abstract: Conference poster PDF
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