Corn Yields and Climate Change: The Innovation Challenge

Production agriculture depends heavily on exogenous environmental conditions, including weather. As such, agriculture is acutely vulnerable to the deleterious long-run effects of climate change. Indeed, mounting evidence suggests the likelihood of large negative impacts. What can be done about it? Actions to deal with climate change can be thought of as pursuing "mitigation" and/or "adaptation"-mitigation is about containing climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, whereas adaptation blunts and counteracts the damaging consequences of climate change. Countries' free-riding incentives make global cooperation to reduce emissions difficult, and thus mitigation problematic. Adaptation, by contrast, is less vulnerable to opportunistic behavior because investments in adaptation often have local payoffs and substantial private good aspects.