Modeling The Effects of Climate Change on Food Production in Ivory Coast: Evidence from ARDL Approach

Abstract

There is a direct link between global warming and hunger in emerging West African nations like Ivory Coast, where the population is overgrowing, and food insecurity is rising. This work aims to examine and explore climate change's effects on agriculture production in Ivory Coast from 1990 to 2019. Various stationarity tests, including the Phillips-Perron (PP) and the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF), are applied to determine the variables' order of integration. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach is employed to model the long- and short-run relationships between temperature, rainfall, carbon dioxide emissions, domestic credit, gross capital formation, and agriculture sector and subsectors. The present study uses the Johansen cointegration test to verify the long-run cointegration of the ARDL estimation. The findings reveal that all the variables are integrated into order zero or one. Cointegration tests demonstrate a valid long-term association between the variables. Agriculture and related subsectors in Ivory Coast were found to benefit from increasing temperature over the long run, except for the fishery subsector, where the impact is negligible. In the short run, temperature’s effect is positive on aggregate agriculture, although it is not statistically significant. Its effect is beneficial to agriculture's subsectors, except for fishery production. In both runs, Ivory Coast’s aggregate agriculture sector and fishery subsector are negatively affected by rainfall. An insignificant favorable effect of rainfall is found on crop production in both runs. The estimated results indicated that the role of CO₂ is positive on agriculture and crop production in both run estimations. However, CO₂ does not impact livestock production. It has a long-term positive influence on fishery production but no effect in the short run. Domestic credit is found to have a beneficial influence on agriculture and its subsectors in both runs, except for crop and livestock production, where the effect is negative and insignificant in the short run. Gross capital formation negatively impacts agriculture and its subsectors in Ivory Coast, except crop production, where it only has an insignificant beneficial effect in the short run. The same is true for fishery production, which only had a significant favourable impact effect in the short run. For the government and policymakers, the findings guide the formulation of suitable policies to address global warming's effects on agriculture and guarantee sustainable food production for the increasing population.