Climate change and weather shocks have multi-faceted impacts on food systems with important implications for economic policy. Combining a longitudinal household survey with high-resolution climate data, we demonstrate that both climate and weather shocks increase food insecurity; cash assistance and participation in Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme have reduced food insecurity; but food assistance has been ineffective. Importantly, households with savings, and those that stored their harvest to sell at higher prices rather than for home use, suffered less from food insecurity, yet both strategies are harder for the poorest and most food insecure households to adopt. Our paper provides micro-founded evidence needed to design policies that both improve agricultural yields in the context of a changing climate and target households’ abilities to cope with shocks that put upwards pressure on food prices.

Shocks related to weather variations have strong effects on developing countries’ economies. Climate change is expected to increase the occurrence and magnitude of extreme weather events such as droughts, floods or hurricanes that strongly affect agriculture and other activities. This special issue gathers literature reviews and case studies that aim to better understand heterogeneous impacts and their transmission channels, as well as to evaluate the impact of such weather shocks on developing economies, including Sub-Saharan African countries, India and Brazil.

Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa is regularly threatened by the occurrence of weather shocks. We wonder whether the way farmers respond to shocks can affect land use and induce deforestation. Reviewing the existing literature, we found that this question has only been marginally studied. Drawing from the adaptation and land-use change literatures, we then expose the mechanisms through which weather shocks can push farmers to induce land-use change, or conversely to foster conservation. As farmers cope with shocks, their responses can cause degradations in ecosystems which could, in the long term, encourage deforestation and land-use change. To prepare for the next growing season, or adapt to climate variability and risk in the longer term, farmers also make structural adjustments in their farm and land-use decisions, which may lead to changes in land holding. They also resort to adaptation strategies that can indirectly affect land-use decisions by affecting households’ resources (labor, income).