“Impactos das variáveis climáticas sobre a produtividade da soja e do milho no Brasil entre 2012 e 2024: evidências da adaptação climática"

Abstract

Climate change represents one of the main challenges facing Brazilian agriculture, particularly strategic crops such as soybeans and corn, whose productivity depends directly on temperature and precipitation conditions. This dissertation aimed to analyze the impacts of climate variables on soybean and corn productivity in Brazil, considering potential nonlinear effects and evidence of climate adaptation from 2012 to 2024. Data were obtained from the IBGE System of Automatic Recovery (SIDRA/IBGE), the Brazilian National Institute of Meteorology (INMET), and the Agricultural Activity Guarantee Program (Proagro/MAPA), and organized into a panel dataset comprising 701 observations. The empirical strategy was based on the estimation of fixed-effects panel data models, including a baseline model, a climate nonlinearity model, and a climate adaptation model, selected through specification tests and evaluated through residual diagnostic tests. The results indicated that average temperature has a negative effect on agricultural productivity, whereas precipitation has a positive effect, with corn being the crop most sensitive to climate variations. In the baseline model, a 1°C increase in temperature was associated with an approximately 6.09% reduction in corn productivity, while a 1 mm increase in precipitation was associated with an approximately 0.31% increase in productivity. The nonlinearity models provided evidence of diminishing returns to precipitation for corn, but no robust evidence of temperature nonlinearity. For soybeans, no statistically significant nonlinear effects were identified. The climate adaptation model showed a partial reduction in corn vulnerability to the adverse effects of temperature over the period analyzed, suggesting that technological advances and improvements in agricultural management contributed to mitigating some of the negative climate impacts. For soybeans, however, no statistically significant evidence of climate adaptation was found. The findings indicate that climate change significantly affects Brazilian agricultural productivity, particularly corn production, reinforcing the need for public policies focused on climate adaptation, technological development, and strengthening the resilience of agricultural production systems in response to the increasing frequency of extreme climate events.