Speaker
Description
Context: More frequent and more severe droughts are among the most visible consequences of climate change in drier regions of the world and a major challenge for global agriculture.
Objectives: We aim to measure drought damages to agricultural production more accurately across all countries and regions in the world from the 1960s until today.
Methods: We combine weather data with crop calendars and spatially explicit data on the production of different crops to create a measure of drought severity as felt in the agricultural sector. We validate the new measure of drought using crop-specific yield data from Brazilian municipalities, US counties, and Indian districts, as well as country-level data from the entire world.
Results: We show that when we take crop calendars and spatial production patterns into account, our measure of drought predicts larger yield losses at the municipal level and at the country-level than conventional measures of drought. Tentative results show little evidence of adaptation at the global level, but the global results mask significant heterogeneity across countries.
Implications: We find that the global effects of drought are larger than what is implied by conventional measures of drought otherwise used in the macro-literature. Our new data on droughts is useful for answering many additional research questions related to droughts.
