PRIVATE (ON-FARM), PUBLIC, AND POLITICAL ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE-CHANGE-INDUCED WATER SCARCITY: EVIDENCE FROM CALIFORNIA

Recognizing that both private (on-farm), political, and public actions will be critical to addressing climate change and water scarcity in California's agriculture sector, our long-term goal is to understand how on-farm, political, and public adaptations each contribute to the value of farming activity and resiliency in California. We use a Ricardian framework, which presumes that the effects of environmental shocks (including climate change-induced water scarcity), farmers' on-farm and political adjustments to them, and policy responses to shocks will be capitalized in changing land values. Thus, whereas previous research has focused on describing and measuring the costs of private inputs and price changes, we also gather data necessary to account for farmers' investments in political action (political adaptation) and the value of changes in public policies (public adaptation) and include these measures in Ricardian models that have been used in the past to estimate the impact of on-farm adaptation to climate change in the agricultural sector. In doing so, our project provides a richer account of adaptation to climate change in California's agricultural sector, with new evidence of the effects of decisions by legislators, regulators, and others on economic outcomes and farming resiliency. We have two objectives to achieve our long-term goal.