Enhancing the sustainability of agricultural systems requires insight into how these complex techno-environmental-behavioral systems are likely to respond to changes in production technologies, anthropogenic environmental shocks, and public policies. Yet integrated models of food-energy-water systems tend to draw primarily on economic models, citing a need for increased biophysical and environmental process details as well as better human behavior feedback loops. We propose a suite of field-resolution models for estimating the effects of environmental and policy changes on cropping behavior. This work estimates a Ricardian model for measuring the impacts of climate (i.e., temperature and precipitation) anthropogenic (i.e., soil salinization and groundwater depletion) change on agriculture cropping practices using panel data in the California Central Valley in 2014 and 2015 (N = 640,028). This panel regression, at the scale of soil salinity data, empirically demonstrates that salt-robust crops replace more salt-sensitive crops as soil salinity increases. We corroborate the panel data econometrics by further estimating a multinomial logit regression at the field-scale, using the same dataset but reducing model complexity from 18 to six crops (N = 101,418). Compared to previous Ricardian analyses which focus mainly on long-term climate trends in temperature and precipitation, our approach captures adaptation to short-term anthropogenic change. We apply the fitted multinomial logit model to varying soil salinities and predict crop shares across the study area; we then pair these crop share yields with a biophysical model of crop salinity tolerance to estimate revenue changes and compare these results to the status quo scenario where growers maintain fixed crop shares regardless of soil salinity. The scenario analysis illustrates the grower behavior’s influence on economic impact assessments of soil salinization, with implications for future salinity management policies.

New methods for quantifying behavioral responses to environmental and policy change

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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