Agricultural Adaptation To Climate Change In China

Global warming has become a generally accepted fact and the interaction between climate change and human society is gradually becoming the attention focus of scientific researchers in various fields.Agriculture production process and the final earnings are subject to the direct effect of climatic factors,since agriculture is the human production activity most closely intertwined with nature.In studies measuring the impact of climate change on agricultural production,whether consider farmers' adaptation to climate change or not may lead to very different conclusions.Measuring accurately the impact of climate change on agricultural production and understanding farmers' ability to adapt to climate change will help to take appropriate measures to mitigate the negative effects of climate change on agriculture production and farm households' income,as well as to make full use of the opportunities for agricultural development that may be brought by climate change.However,among previous studies about the impact of climate change on agriculture in China,few of them under the assumption of farmers' climate change adaptation,and the evidence for the existence of farmers' adaptive behaviors is invalid and inadequate.Combined with existing research results and reality,this paper uses the more accurate data—county agricultural production panel data and meteorological station data,analyzes trends in climate change in different regions in China from year of 1960 to 2013.And then establishes linear regression models and long-difference models of the main crops(rice,wheat,corn,soybean)in different regions to quantify the impacts of annual growing period climate change and long-period climate change on crops' yield per hectare,and compare the conclusions.Based on rural farmers' fixed observation panel data,this paper establishes extended Ricardian model to analyze the impact of climatic factors on the farm household's agricultural income(yuan/ha/year)and crops' yield(kg/ha)and determine the adaptive behavior of farmers in different types,then proposed to address climate change policy implications.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)National and regional annual temperatures have increased significantly over the past 54 years,and the increasing rate of national average temperature is 0.22 ?/10a.The temperature increasing rate of northern China is higher then southern China,and minimum temperature increasing rate is higher then maximum temperature.Temperature increasing rates in southwest,South China,south regions of Yangtze and Huang-Huai are relatively low,while these rates are high in North Plain,northeast and northwest.(2)Rice,wheat,corn,soybean range widely grown in the country,the time span of crops' growing period in different regions of is different,gaps of crop growing season increases with increasing latitude differences of crops' area.Contrary to annual average temperature trends,growth period accumulated temperatures of crops in most regions showed slight downward trends,only which of winter wheat planted in northwest,North Plain and Huang-Huai have significant upward trends.Crop growing period precipitation trends were lack of rule,varying among regions and crop varieties.(3)The model that measures the impact of annual growth period accumulated temperature and precipitation on yields per hectare has high fitting degree,indicating that volatility climatic factors have a significant impact on crop yields.However,the long-difference model for the long-term effects of climate change has low model fit,and for most crops,the coefficients of climate variables in the model are not significant,indicating that the long-term impact of climate change on yields ineffective.Differences in these regression results can be explained by that under long period,agricultural production has adaptation to climate change.(4)Climate change in the same direction have a significant impact on farm income of farm households and crop yields,and the increase of temperature and precipitation have largely negative effects.Nationally,the negative impact of accumulated temperature on crops' yield per hectare is greater than the impact on income per hectare,indicating that under elevating temperatures trends,climate adaptation measures taken by farmers adjust crop varieties and planting structure,and thus be able to weakening the negative impact of rising temperatures on family farming income while crops' yield per hectare decreasing under the impact of temperature increasing.(5)For the perspective of different types of farm households,in northern region,due to the farmers,adaptive behaviors,the negative impact of increasing temperature and the positive impact of increasing precipitation are both weakened.Nevertheless,in southern China,increasing temperature has negative impact on crop production per unit area but then has a positive impact on farming income,which may because the temperature is too high,so that farmers have to change the type of crop;such as they transit from grain to higher value-added crops.Climate change has the effect of different scale farmers for some differences.The change of accumulated temperature has larger effect on the crops' yield change of small-scale farm households,but has less effect on their operating income per unit area than large-scale farm households,which shows that under the background of fluctuations yield caused by the change in temperature,the relatively small-scale farmers prefer to take measures to stabilize the farming income than large-scale farmers.Finally,combined with the above conclusions and the reality,this paper makes policy recommendations to address climate change from the perspective of agricultural production and farmers point of view,in order to enhance agriculture's ability to adapt to climate change,mitigate the negative effects on agricultural production and the income of agricultural producers,and take the full advantage of the potential agricultural development opportunities accompanied with climate change.Specific recommendations are as follows:acknowledge the distinction between regions and crop varieties when deal with the impact of climate change;focus on adaptation to climate change trends when promoting new crop varieties and agricultural technology;strengthen agricultural infrastructure construction and perfect their function;improve the agriculture related meteorological monitoring and warning system for agricultural production;pay attention to the impact of climate change on agricultural producers' benefit to ensure food security fundamentally.