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Climate-induced changes in agricultural land use: parcel-level evidence from California’s Central Valley

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Siddharth Kishore
Siddharth Kishore
Siddharth Kishore
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Mehdi Nemati
Mehdi Nemati
Mehdi Nemati
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Ariel Dinar
Ariel Dinar
Ariel Dinar
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Cory L. Struthers
Cory L. Struthers
Cory L. Struthers
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Abstract and Figures

How growers adjust land-use decisions to a changing climate has important consequences for food supplies and environmental impact. In this paper, we examine changes in agricultural land use as an adaptive response to long-term climate impacts, using unique parcel-level data in Central Valley, California – a major agricultural hub worldwide. We combine parcel-specific acreage decisions and climate normal to assess the climate-induced land use transition. We find that growers in the Central Valley are transitioning from annual crops to perennial crops in response to changing climates. Summer degree days and total precipitation increased the share of perennial crops, and projected declines in winter chill hours are also expected to increase the share of perennial crops in the Central Valley. Analysis of land-use with heterogeneous land quality suggests that the share of perennial crops increased 11% in high-quality lands and 7% in low quality lands.
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Received: 30 October 2024 / Accepted: 6 March 2025 / Published online: 17 March 2025
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2025
Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Climate-induced changes in agricultural land use: parcel-
level evidence from California’s Central Valley
SiddharthKishore1· MehdiNemati2· ArielDinar1· Cory L.Struthers3·
ScottMacKenzie4· Matthew S.Shugart4
Climatic Change (2025) 178:59
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-025-03905-8
Abstract
How growers adjust land-use decisions to a changing climate has important consequences
for food supplies and environmental impact. In this paper, we examine changes in agricul-
tural land use as an adaptive response to long-term climate impacts, using unique parcel-
level data in Central Valley, California – a major agricultural hub worldwide. We combine
parcel-specic acreage decisions and climate normal to assess the climate-induced land
use transition. We nd that growers in the Central Valley are transitioning from annual
crops to perennial crops in response to changing climates. Summer degree days and total
precipitation increased the share of perennial crops, and projected declines in winter chill
hours are also expected to increase the share of perennial crops in the Central Valley.
Analysis of land-use with heterogeneous land quality suggests that the share of perennial
crops increased 11% in high-quality lands and 7% in low quality lands.
Keywords Climate change adaptation · Land-use modeling · Perennial crops · Annual
crops · California
1 Introduction
Climate change has been the subject of much research in agriculture (Lobell et al. 2007;
Lobell and Field 2011; Lobell et al. 2011; Deschenes and Kolstad 2011; Lee and Sumner
2015). The majority of work is conducted using county-level data to assess the relationship
between acreage decisions and climate (e.g., Cui 2020; Cui and Zhong 2024), with a few
notable exceptions that use individual farm-level data (e.g., Ramsey et al. 2021; Wimmer
et al. 2024; Ji and Cobourn 2021). Despite the extensive literature on climate-agriculture
interactions, there is little empirical evidence on changes in acreage decisions in response
to climate change at the micro level. The most recent estimates of climate-induced crop
switching in dryland agriculture have been at the county-level scale (e.g., Arora et al. 2020;
Mu et al. 2018) and mask signicant parcel-level heterogeneity. Using unique parcel-level
1 3
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