Impact of Climate Change on Cassava Yield in Nigeria: An Autoregressive Distributed Lag Bound Approach

Abstract

Across the globe, climate change is threatening the environment, crop yield and food security. The key to ensuring a sustainable environment, crop yield increase and food security is to identify the long-term significant impact of climate change and the means of reducing the effect. This study examined the impacts of climate change on cassava yield in Nigeria. Data were sourced from the Climate Change Knowledge Portal and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations spanning from 1990 to 2019. The impact of climate change was analyzed using Autoregressive Distributed Lag Bound approach, Error Correction Model and Augmented Dickey–Fuller and Phillips–Perron tests for stationarity test. The model was subjected to diagnostic tests such as stability tests, normality tests, serial correlation tests and heteroscedasticity tests. With the exception of temperature, the study revealed that arable land, rainfall and greenhouse gases such as C2O, nitrous oxide and methane had a long-term significant impact on cassava yield in Nigeria. The study also noted that methane causes long-term significant damage to cassava yield more than any other greenhouse gas and climatic variables in the study. We recommended policies and programs that facilitate the uptake of climate-smart agriculture that centers on greenhouse gas emission reduction and on crop improvement research by breeding crop varieties that will be resilient to climate shocks.

How Does Climate Change Affect Tomato and Okra Production? Evidence from Nigeria

“…Consequently, the crops are especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change because they lose a lot of water through evapotranspiration in hot, dry climates, creating salty deposits around the roots that prevent the crops from absorbing water and, thus, lower their yields and output [30]. Some theoretical and empirical studies have focused on investigating climate impacts on cereal crops, such as rice, maize, wheat, and sorghum [35][36][37][38], and tuber crops [39,40], such as cassava. There is growing debate on the impacts of climate change on agriculture, and several attempts have been made to model climate change and agricultural production interaction.…”