The Economic Analysis Of Climate Change Impact On Rice In Southern China And Its Adaptive Strategies

The issue of global warming have been proposed on the international conference about "The greenhouse gases and its impact on climate change" in Austrian Since 1985, climate change has increasingly become a globally recognized environmental problems, especially in the past one decade, the worldwide climate anomalies have brought serious impacts on the food production, water resources and energy consequences in many countries ,and brought great attention to the world.Agriculture is one of the most sensitive sectors to climate change, the climate is an important factor which will exert influence on crop production except for the technology and the breed. Because of the impact from the climate change, the future output of the world’s three major crops (wheat, maize and rice) will reduce in the most developing countries, while will increase in developed countries in the northern hemisphere.China is one of the developing countries which are suffered from the adverse effects of climate change seriously, " China’s National Climate Change Program" (2008) Pointed out that the consequences brought out by the future climate change have three aspects:firstly, climate change will led to the increase of instability of agricultural output, unless taking adaptation measures, the output of wheat, rice and maize will decrease, secondly, the layout and the structure of agricultural production will change and the cropping systems and the crop varieties will change; finally, the agricultural conditions will change and the agriculture cost and the investment demand will increase dramatically. Thus, the assessments of climate change impact and the adaptation strategies are becoming the most active academic research currently.Presently, China’s rice dominant areas are mainly distributed in the Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu in Yangtze River, Guangdong, Guangxi, Fujian in southern region and northeastern-three provinces, forming a clear southern rice region and northern rice region. Southern rice region account for 81.8% of the whole rice area, therefore, to explore the impact of climate change on the South rice, and analyzing the coping strategies for climate change is of great significance to ensure food security and maintain social stability.The theories and methods of economics has been not yet introduced in the current China’s Meteorology study universally, while the economist lack the concept of climate change, thus makes cross-cutting research progress slowly, so the domestic existing research are still unable to answer the following questions:After considering the climatic factors and socio-economic factors, to what extent impact of climate change on rice yield in the South? how much is Southern Rice vulnerability to climate change? Is Farmers will take adaptive behavior to climate change and What is its influencing factors? This series questions are the starting point of this study.This study construct the economy-climate model (referred to as C-D-C model), firstly on the basis of C-D function as the theoretical model, make empirical analysis of climate change on rice yield in the South reagion and the impact of future climate change scenarios were simulated and assessed. At the same time, the author build the assessment index system of the South rice vulnerability to climate change and make an empirical analysis of the rice vulnerability to climate change in Jiangxi Province as an example, and examine the causes which lead to the rice vulnerability. On this basis, the author made a comprehensive survey for the adaptation measures of climate change by micro household survey data in the southern rice region, and made an analysis of the factors which influence farmers behavior of adapting to climate change by Heckman Probit two-step model.Finally, the author put forward to the countermeasures and the proposals.The main conclusions are as follows:1.climate change has a significant negative impact on rice output of the southern, the average monthly precipitation during the growth period of rice increasing 10mm would give rise to the fell of 0.40% for the southern rice output, and the monthly average temperature rising 1℃will lead to the fell of 2.52%-3.48% of rice output.2.Climate change have a different negative impact on different regions, Precipitation has a negative role on the southern, central and eastern regions, while has a positive impact on the southwest region; Temperature has a negative impact on the southwest, south, eastern and central region.3.By three GCMs climate change scenarios, this paper simulated and evaluated the impact of climate change, and its results show that the future various climate change scenarios have a negative impact on the rice yield in the South, it is expected to be the decreasing of 1.88% to 7.83% in 2020s, the decreasing of 2.85% to 14.87% in 2050s. the largest negative impact reagion is the Southwest area, following the South area and East area, the Central area with minimal impact.4. This paper make an empirical analysis of rice vulnerability to climate change in Jiang xi Province as a case, on the base of the building comprehensive evaluation model of rice vulnerability to climate change.this results showed:the sensitivity of Jiangxi rice were in the low and moderate sensitive state mainly, the adaptation were in the low and moderate adaptation state mainly, While the overall vulnerability of the rice was great and was in a moderate and high vulnerable state. At the same time, the article also analyzes the performance and the causes of every regional vulnerability, and raised some policy proposals of adapting climate change for different regions:the Measures which strengthen agricultural infrastructure construction, improve capabilities of the natural risk-defense are good for the vulnerability areas dominanted by sensitive climate; there are measures which change the traditional farming methods, enhance vegetation restoration and control soil erosion for the vulnerability areas dominanted by irrational land use; for the vulnerability areas which were poor adaptability, speeding up rural economic development and enhancing their incomes will be right choices.5.This paper made an empirical analysis of climate change adaptation behavior of farmers and its influencing factors, and the results showed that the majority of farmers perceived significant climate change, and the increasing trend of heatday number, decreasing trend of rainly day. There are more than 50% of the farmers who has taken adaptive measures responsing to climate change. For the factors which affecting the Farmers’perception on climate change, the age of head-household, the education, the frequency of communicating with the villagers, relatives number, the market frequency, the frequency of watching television, the distance from the market and weather information services have all significant impact on the perception of farmers for climate change. For the factors which affecting the farmers’adaptation behavior on climate change, the gender of head-household, the age, the education, the number of borrowing and relatives, the frequencies of watching television, the frequencies of marketing, Weather Information Service have a significant effect on the adaptation of farmers for climate change.Finally, this paper put forward some policies and proposals for address climate change in light of the above conclusions, which were mainly in three aspects:The first is about policy proposal of mitigating climate change; The second is about policy proposal of adapting to climate change; The third is about policy proposal of guiding and promoting the farmers to actively take adaptive behavior and measures for climate change.