Open AccessHistorical warming has increased U.S. crop insurance losses
Author(s) -
Noah S. Diffenbaugh,
Frances V. Davenport,
Marshall Burke
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
environmental research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.37
H-Index - 124
ISSN - 1748-9326
DOI - 10.1088/1748-9326/ac1223
Subject(s) - crop insurance , damages , global warming , climate change , environmental science , agriculture , natural resource economics , yield (engineering) , crop , crop yield , economics , agricultural economics , geography , ecology , materials science , archaeology , forestry , political science , metallurgy , law , biology
Quantification of the sector-specific financial impacts of historical global warming represents a critical gap in climate change impacts assessment. The multiple decades of county-level data available from the U.S. crop insurance program—which collectively represent aggregate damages to the agricultural sector largely borne by U.S. taxpayers—present a unique opportunity to close this gap. Using econometric analysis in combination with observed and simulated changes in county-level temperature, we show that global warming has already contributed substantially to rising crop insurance losses in the U.S. For example, we estimate that county-level temperature trends have contributed $US 2017 27.0 billion—or 19%—of the national-level crop insurance losses over the 1991–2017 period. Further, we estimate that observed warming contributed almost half of total losses in the most costly single year (2012). In addition, analyses of a large suite of global climate model simulations yield very high confidence that anthropogenic climate forcing has increased U.S. crop insurance losses. These sector-specific estimates provide important quantitative information about the financial costs of the global warming that has already occurred (including the costs of individual extreme events), as well as the economic value of mitigation and/or adaptation options.