Economic Impacts of Climate Change on Selected Strategic Crops in Iran

Agriculture may be particularly vulnerable to climate change due to its dependence on natural weather patterns and climate cycles for its productivity. Global warming may also threaten food security in the case of its negative effect on agriculture. Therefore, there is the need to empirically examine the effect of climate change on agriculture. This study aimed at investigating whether or not the climate change would be influencing the level of strategic crops production in Iran. For this purpose, the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model was used to estimate the impact of climate change on wheat, barely, maize and rice production. The results of historical data (1961-2014) estimation revealed that no significant negative effect of climate change on the selected crops production were observed yet either in the short term or in the long term while rice, barley, wheat and maize products, respectively, had the highest speed of adjustment in response to any shock and deviation from their long-term equilibrium state as well as in terms of the impact of carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration, the maize crop would have the greatest increase in production and rice would have the least positive impact per one percent increase in carbon dioxide. In addition, it was found that over the last half century, some negative effects of climate change were seemingly offset by more intense use of water and soil resources, though it would be no longer possible. Therefore, 'application of advanced technologies' and 'extension of climate-smart agriculture' could be considered as the appropriate solutions to prevent the catastrophic consequences of climate change on the agricultural sector. Also, according to the study results, some applicable adaptive measures were suggested to oppose any adverse shock to the crops production in Iran.