Atmospheric Opacity Has a Non-linear Effect on Global Crop Yields

Abstract

Agricultural impacts of air pollution, climate change and geoengineering remain uncertain due to potentially offsetting changes in the quantity and quality of sunlight. By leveraging year-to-year variation in growing season cloud optical thickness, we provide non-linear empirical estimates of how increased atmospheric opacity alters sunlight across the Earth’s surface, and how this affects maize and soy yields in the United States, Europe, Brazil and China. We find that the response of yields to changes in sunlight from cloud scattering and absorption is consistently concave across crops and regions. An additional day of optimal cloud cover, relative to a clear-sky day, increases maize and soy yields by 0.4%. Changes in sunlight due to changes in clouds have decreased global average maize and soy yields by 1% and 0.1% due to air pollution and may further decrease yields by 1.8% and 0.4% due to climate change.