An assessment of climate change impacts on maize yields in Hebei Province of China

The climate change impacts on maize yields are quantified in this paper using statistical models with panel data from 3731 farmers' observations across nine sample villages in Hebei Province of China. The marginal impacts of climate change and the simulated impacts on maize yields based on scenarios of Representative Concentration Pathways 2.6, 4.5, 6.0, and 8.5 from the global climate models of Model for Interdisciplinary Research on Climate version 5 (MIR005) and Meteorological Research Institute Coupled General Circulation Model version 3 (MRICGCM3) were then calculated, analyzed, and explained. The results indicate that, first, the most important finding was that climate change impacts on maize yields were significant and a 1 degrees C warming or a 1 mm decrease in precipitation resulted in a 150.255 kg or a 1.941 kg loss in maize yields per hectare, respectively. Second, villages with latitudes of less than 39.832 and longitudes of more than 114.839 in Hebei province suffered losses due to warm weather. Third, the simulated impacts for the full sample are all negative based on scenarios from MIR005, and their magnitudes are more than those of MRI-CGCM3 are. Based on scenarios in the 2050s, the biggest loss for maize yields per hectare for the full sample accounts for about one-tenth of the mean maize yield from 2004 to 2010, and all of the villages are impacted. Hence, it is important to help farms adopt an adaptation strategy to tackle the risk of loss for maize yields from climate change, and it is necessary to develop agricultural synthesis services as a public adaptation policy at the village level to interact with the adaptation strategy at the farm level.