Climate change is expected to lower U.S. corn, soybean, and wheat production and drive up the cost of the federally subsidized crop insurance program. The increase could be as small as 4 percent or as large as 37 percent, depending on how much temperatures rise and whether mitigation efforts are effective, said a USDA report on Monday.
“Much depends on the severity of future warming,” said the report by the Economic Research Service. Crop insurance is the largest federal farm support, with a cost of around $7 billion for 2018 crops. For the report, six ERS analysts looked at two scenarios, one in which greenhouse gas emissions stabilize and there is some mitigation and another in which emissions continue to rise and there is no mitigation.
Corn acreage could drop by 7 percent and soybeans by 4 percent under the milder version of climate change; corn plantings would fall by 12 percent and soybeans by 8 percent under the harsher scenario. Wheat would see little change. For all three crops, the report projected that growers would use irrigation to keep some land in production and would abandon some dryland acreage.
“Under the moderate emissions scenario, the cost of today’s [federal crop insurance program] would be about 3.5 percent higher than under a future with a climate similar to that of the recent past. Under the higher emissions scenario, this cost increase is 22 percent,” said the economists. “If the study did not include adaptation in its models, the estimates of cost increases would jump to 10 percent and 37 percent under the moderate and severe greenhouse gas concentration scenarios, respectively.”