P1 - Climate change and intergenerational persistence of poverty and malnutrition

Status: Ongoing

Duration: 2021 - 2025

Keywords: Agricultural Economics, Development Economics, Natural Resource Economics

Description

Climate-induced shocks do not only cause hunger and income deprivation, but also lead to a loss of assets (livestock, savings, soil fertility, human capital) that hampers income opportunities of smallholder farms on the long run. Climatic risks require farmers to reserve part of their resources to prepare for adverse outcomes and put them at a more disadvantaged position compared with more resource-rich farms, who are able to pursue more profitable, but riskier production options (Dercon & Christiaensen 2011). Climate variability may in this way lock smallholders within a poverty trap that will transmit over generations, given that the starting position of a new household is determined to a significant part by intergenerational transfers of productive assets and human capital (Kumar & Quisumbing 2012). Research into poverty traps has been relying on econometric analysis, with very few examples of simulation studies, neither of which considers intra-household dynamics (Barret et al. 2016). Bioeconomic agent-based simulation models (ABM) have been successfully established on High Performance Computing (HPC) systems (Troost & Berger 2016) and employed to study agricultural adaptation to climate change in industrial (e.g. Troost & Berger 2015) and developing countries (e.g. Berger et al. 2017). While ABM have been used to study farm succession in industrial country contexts (e.g. Freeman et al. 2009) and some studies have included basic intra-household dynamics (fertility, mortality) (e.g. Schreinemachers et al. 2007), incorporating asset transfer, new household formation and malnutrition into an empirically parameterized bioeconomic ABM remains unexplored, but highly relevant to understand long-term poverty dynamics under climate change.

The project will use the bioeconomic ABM framework MPMAS (Schreinemachers & Berger 2011; Berger et al., 2017) to simulate the long-term fate of smallholder farming households and their descendants in selected villages in Central Ethiopia. It will extend the MPMAS model application built in the CLIFOOD Phase I subproject "Robust adaptation strategies to climate change for Ethiopian agriculture – heterogeneity of farming households and the role of social networks" by parameterizing household dynamics, intergenerational transfers, and seasonal and permanent migration based on quantitative and qualitative surveys and literature analysis. Through extensive simulation experiments using the Baden-Württemberg HPC (bwHPC) resources, it will analyze the influence of external (i.e. climate change, locust invasion, macroeconomic development, cultural rules, policy) and internal (household demographics, intergenerational transfers, technology adoption) dynamics on the long-term development of the asset and resource base and nutritional status of village households.

Involved persons

Prof. Dr. Thomas Berger, Dr. Christian Troost
Samuel Elias Kayamo

Involved institutions

Land Use Economics (490d), University of Hohenheim

Involved persons

Involved institutions

Sponsors