Climate Change Impacts and Agriculture: Empirical Evidence from Zarafshan River Basin, Uzbekistan
Climate change is becoming one of most disruptive phenomena for the agriculture of Central Asian countries, particularly for the predominantly rural communities. Nonetheless, the consequences of climate changes are still remaining uncertain and aridity is going to increase further in arid zones of the region, like in Uzbekistan. Agriculture as being an important sector for national economy is highly vulnerable to climate shocks and predicted future climate consequences may pose severe challenges to the resilience of Uzbek agricultural system, especially in terms of food security and income stability of rural producers. In this context, by aggregating both climatic and agricultural data we proposed to review the climate projections through agricultural transition and to analyze the impact of climate change (temperature and rainfall) on wheat yield for the first time in three regions of Uzbekistan, where irrigated agriculture has developed in Zarafshan River Basin. In this study district level panel data employed and analysis was implemented using Fixed effect model. Empirical findings revealed that, annual temperature has positive influence on wheat yield in short run. However, wheat farmers may suffer in distant future from increased temperature on their production. The annual precipitation amount has positive relation with production. In terms of seasonality changes, increase in temperature was found to have significant negative impact in all seasons. Contrary, precipitation has significant positive influence in all seasons except summer in the regions of Zarafshan River Basin.
Climate Change, Agricultural Transition, Wheat Yield, Zarafshan River Basin
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