Promoting sustainable agrifood production in changing climate: Adaptation, returns, and food security implications

Abstract

Climate change is challenging sustainable agrifood production and food security, and encouraging farmers’ climate change adaptation can help promote sustainable agrifood production and ensure food security. The primary objective of this study is to investigate farmers’ climate change adaptation and its impact on agrifood production. We employ the propensity score matching (PSM) model to address the selection bias issue of climate change adaptation and estimate the survey data collected from 415 rice-producing households in rural China. Both Kernal-based matching and nearest-neighbor matching techniques are employed to ensure the validity of estimated results. We also estimate the inverse probability weighted regression adjustment (IPWRA) model for robustness check. The empirical results show that farmers’ decisions on climate change adaptation are influenced by household heads’ age, education level and life satisfaction, family size, access to extension, and transportation condition. The treatment effect estimations of the PSM model reveal that climate change adaptation significantly increases land productivity by 42.82-46.13% and labor productivity by 53.62-61.76% in rice production. The IPWRA model estimation largely confirms the robustness of the PSM model estimation. We also find that climate change adaptation significantly increases the net returns of rice production.