The impact of climate change and drought persistence on farmland values in New Zealand: An application of a Hedonic method of climate-land pricing

New Zealand Agricultural and Resource Economics Society (2019)

We quantify the impacts of climate change on New Zealand’s agriculture. We explore the nonlinear relationship between climate variables and farmland values while controlling for socio-economic and topographical-geographical features. Furthermore, we measure the persistence of drought using autoregressive (AR) model.

We simulate future farmland values under climate change. Preliminary results show the heterogeneity in which rural land values are affected by climate depending on the land use category.

The rural land value decreases with summer temperature among all land uses, while it increases with spring temperature. The cumulative impacts of soil moisture deficit in summer reduce farmland values.