The domestic and international implications of future climate for U.S. agriculture in GCAM.

• Main Authors: Abigail Snyder, Katherine Calvin, Leon Clarke, James Edmonds, Page Kyle, Kanishka Narayan, Alan Di Vittorio, Stephanie Waldhoff, Marshall Wise, Pralit Patel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2020-01-01
• Series: PLoS ONE
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237918

Agricultural crop yields are susceptible to changes in future temperature, precipitation, and other Earth system factors. Future changes to these physical Earth system attributes and their effects on agricultural crop yields are highly uncertain. United States agricultural producers will be affected by such changes whether they occur domestically or internationally through international commodity markets. Here we present a replication study of previous investigations (with different models) showing that potential direct domestic climate effects on crop yields in the U.S. have financial consequences for U.S. producers on the same order of magnitude but opposite in sign to indirect financial impacts on U.S. producers from climate effects on crop yields elsewhere in the world. We conclude that the analysis of country-specific financial climate impacts cannot ignore indirect effects arising through international markets. We find our results to be robust across a wide range of potential future crop yield impacts analyzed in the multi-sector dynamic global model GCAM.