Uncovering the climate vulnerability of China’s poverty alleviation frontiers

Climate Change Impacts on Agriculture and Adaptation Options for Uzbekistan

Climate change is likely to reshape agriculture in an irrigated, water-scarce transition economy like Uzbekistan. We use IFPRI’s International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT) model and evaluate the direct effects of climate change on Uzbekistan’s agriculture through 2050. We assume changes in GDP, population, and technological progress to be exogenous. We find that climate change and the corresponding temperature increase will have significant adverse effects on the long-term yields of cotton and wheat through changes in water availability, precipitation patterns, crop yields, and the use of land, water, and other natural resources, but harvested area responses may differ. All climate change scenarios are similar in predicting an increase in harvested area for temperate fruits and vegetables, but their yield gains remain conditional on market prices, policy reform, water use and institutional constraints. For policymakers, this makes climate change adaptation actions an opportunity for incentives and structural reforms as well as for technology to adapt to changing environmental conditions and to ensure food security.

Cash transfers relax climate-induced mobility constraints in Kenya

The use of migration as an adaptation strategy is now recognized by scholars and policymakers as a key response to climate change. Cash transfer programs, now being implemented worldwide, also have the potential to facilitate adaptation and promote resilience in low- and middle-income countries. We investigate the extent to which a cash transfer program in Kenya promoted the mobility of household members due to climate shocks, leveraging exogenous variation in local deviations from the historical climate and the administration of the program through a randomized controlled trial. Our findings indicate that beneficiary households were less likely to reduce migration amid cold spells, likely via shifts in education-related migration. We also find that heat spells ubiquitously encourage new members to join the household, while cold spells have the opposite effect, and that cash transfers do not appear to alter these relationships. Together the results suggest that cold spells can trap migrants in temperate, low-resource settings and that cash transfers can partially alleviate these constraints. Modeling migration and complementary strategies in the presence of climate tipping points will become necessary to predict when more permanent migration will be triggered and modifying social assistance will become necessary.