Projections of the economic consequences of climate change are valuable for policy making but generally rely on integrated assessments that cannot account for highly localized climate effects. Most agricultural climate impact studies focus on local effects or partial productivity measures insufficient to capture national economic outcomes. Here, we directly link climate variables in specific US regions to total factor productivity (TFP).

The goal of this work is to assess climate change and its impact on the predictability of seasonal (i.e., April–July) streamflow in major water supply watersheds in the Sierra Nevada.

Original Source

Augmenting previous papers about the exceptional 2011–2015 California drought, we offer new perspectives on the “snow drought” that extended into Oregon in 2014 and Washington in 2015. Over 80% of measurement sites west of 115°W experienced record low snowpack in 2015, and we estimate a return period of 400–1000 years for California’s snowpack under the questionable assumption of stationarity. Hydrologic modeling supports the conclusion that 2015 was the most severe on record by a wide margin.

Cannabis agriculture is a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States that is changing rapidly with policy liberalization. Anecdotal observations fuel speculation about associated environmental impacts, and there is an urgent need for systematic empirical research. An example from Humboldt County California, a principal cannabis-producing region, involved digitizing 4428 grow sites in 60 watersheds with Google Earth imagery. Grows were clustered, suggesting disproportionate impacts in ecologically important locales.