Impact of Climate Change in Agriculture: Estimation, Adaptation, and Mitigation Issues

There is an inherent link between how climate change affects different populations and how the burden of environmental policy is unevenly distributed across individuals within a given population. Who pays or benefits for environmental regulations largely depends on how the impact of climate change is heterogeneous across countries and individuals. In this chapter, we first introduce the relationship between climate change, agriculture, and food security, providing also an overview of the main adaptation and mitigation strategies. To follow, we summarize the emerging methods developed in the last two decades to empirically quantify the economic costs of climate change, by presenting a general framework to explain why it is crucial to better understand how and where climate affects economic behavior.