Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 18
Climate Change and
Agriculture
Countering Doomsday Scenarios
Derrill D. Watson II
Introduction
Climate change threatens agriculture on multiple levels; agriculture in turn has a signifi-
cant role to play in mitigating climate change and helping humans adapt to its impacts.1
Food systems will not be sustainable or fulfill their primary mission of providing human
health and nutrition without an adaptive agriculture in tune with its natural resource
base and resilient to climate changes. The worst impacts of climate change are expected to
fall on the poorest, who are the least well-equipped to adapt to it. Most climate-change lit-
erature focuses on difficult trade-offs generated by these interdependences. For example,
environmental preservation depresses economic growth and, thus, reproduces or exacer-
bates poverty. At the extreme, these fateful trade-offs converge on doomsday scenarios.
This chapter posits that significant positive complementarities between improving
agricultural production, mitigating and adapting to climate change, and reducing pov-
erty. This is a slightly different claim from the classical argument that there are synergies
between them. The idea of synergies between the three posits, for instance, that reduc-
tions in poverty can help mitigate some forms of environmental degradation. Synergies
imply that improvements in one sector can provide additional spillover benefits to
other sectors, creating multiple-win policy options. The evidence for such synergistic
multiple-wins was reviewed in Lee and Barrett (2001) and found to be incomplete.
Complementarity claims that these multiple-win synergies increase with the esti-
mated impacts of climate change. Thus, the worse you believe the effects of climate
change will be, the more valuable it will be for governments and nongovernmental
actors to invest in sustainable agricultural growth and poverty reduction. Sassi and
Cardaci (2012) are among the few to explicitly take into account the fact that the triple
burden of poverty, food insecurity, and climate change interact nonlinearly. They con-
clude that policy coordination between poverty, food, and climate will be essential in
dealing with any of them. Ongoing investment in agriculture and poverty reduction are
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