Abstract
Numerous studies have addressed climate change's impact on agriculture, yet the specific effects on wheat production in Turkey remain under-explored. This research aims to bridge this gap by quantifying these impacts in Turkey over 25 years. As the region's principal wheat producer, Turkey offers a unique context, situated in the area where wheat was first domesticated. We analyzed a comprehensive dataset comprising over 20,000 records from 820 political districts, employing a panel data fixed-effect model to mitigate unobserved heterogeneity and reveal dynamic time-related patterns. We focused on critical climate variables: temperature, precipitation, and drought. The results show a significant 9% decrease in wheat yields following a 1.5 °C rise in temperature, affecting nearly 1 million hectares. A notable finding is the 'May effect', highlighting how climatic changes in May disproportionately affect wheat yields. This study provides detailed insights into the temporal and geographic aspects of climate change's impact on wheat production, emphasizing the need for targeted policy actions and strategic agricultural planning, particularly in dry areas.
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Data availability
The majority of datasets utilized in this study are publicly accessible. District-level wheat production data until 2004 and price variable data are available at TurkStat’s website (https://www.tuik.gov.tr/). A supplementary dataset from TurkStat was obtained for the periods preceding 2004. Climate variables were derived from the Climate Research Unit’s high-resolution gridded datasets (https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/). Drought variables were extracted from the CEDA Archive (https://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5285/ac43da11867243a1bb414e1637802dec) and the Global SPEI database (https://spei.csic.es/database.html).
Notes
We checked the cited paper (Harris et al. 2020) of the dataset on Web of Science. Even though it was a recent paper, it had more than 1500 citations on November 2023.
We also considering the other three estimates in the Gebrechorkos et al. (2023), the results were similar and are available from the authors upon the request.
In addition to the twelve-month SPEI, we also calculated our drought model using six-month SPEI values. The results were similar and are available from the authors upon the request.
See Fig. 1 for a general overview of the methodological flow of the paper.
We also estimated the non-linear model using the squares of temperature and precipitation variables. The coefficients of the non-linear variables were not different than zero in terms of magnitude or statistical significance. The results are available from the authors upon request.
The temperature coefficient in the column 1 of Table 5 is -0.066, while the interaction variable coefficient is 0.062.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Hakan Ozkan from Cukurova University for his valuable feedback on this paper, Arap Diri from TurkStat and Serdar Ali from the Meteorological Service for their assistance with data collection.
Funding
Alper Demirdogen acknowledges the partial financial support for this research project from TUBITAK’s 2219 scholarship program.
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Alper Demirdogen: Conceptualization, original draft writing, methodology, data analysis, editing.
Baris Karapinar: Conceptualization, original draft writing, supervision, review, and editing.
Gökhan Özertan: Supervision, writing, review, and editing.
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Demirdogen, A., Karapinar, B. & Özertan, G. The impact of climate change on wheat in Turkey. Reg Environ Change 24, 20 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-023-02172-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-023-02172-6