Adaptation to Climate Change: Historical Evidence from the Indian Monsoon.

摘要

There is a growing consensus that global temperature and precipitation patterns will change over the coming century, yet we have scant evidence on how agents will adapt to these new climate patterns. Existing estimates of climate change adaptation rely almost exclusively on extrapolation from cross-sectional variation, an approach that suffers from omitted variable bias and additionally relies on the assumptions of costless adaptation and of perfect knowledge of climate change. In this dissertation, I provide new and more reliable estimates of the ability of farmers to adapt to changes in their climate, based on evidence from historical variation in the intensity of the Indian monsoon. The Indian monsoon undergoes zonal and meridional regimes, during which droughts or floods are more common respectively, and these regimes last several decades. I test whether farmers adapt their agricultural practices in response to the monsoon regimes. I find evidence that farmers adjust their irrigation investment and the water-intensiveness of their crop portfolio, depending on which monsoon regime they currently face. However, the ability of farmers to protect their profits via adaptation is limited: I find that only 15% of the profits lost due to harmful changes in the climate are recovered via adaptation.