Abstract:

With high sensitivity and vulnerability to extreme weather, the agricultural field is chosen as the research object in this paper. By introducing the extreme weather factors and agricultural factors into the Cobb-Douglas production function, an economic climate model is developed and the effect of extreme weather events on agricultural production in Zhejiang Province is analyzed quantitatively. The results show that there is a long-term close equilibrium relationship between extreme weather events and agricultural production, and extreme weather has a significant negative impact on agricultural production. With each 1% increases of the high temperature days, the low temperature days, the heavy rain days resulted in the agricultural production decrease with 0.072%, 0.046%, 0.076% respectively. In addition, the short-term fluctuations of the high temperature days and the heavy rain days have significant negative impact on agricultural production, the extent of the influence by extreme weather on agricultural production manifests differences in different regions. Compared with the eastern coastal areas, northwest and southwest of Zhejiang Province are affected by extreme weather more seriously.

Key words: extreme weather, agricultural production, output elasticity, long-term equilibrium, short-term fluctuations, Cobb-Douglas production function