Economic Impacts of Climate Change on Maize Production in Tanzania: the case study of Iringa and Mbeya region.

This study analyzed the economic impact of climate change on maize production for the case study of Iringa and Mbeya region. Data for the study was collected during year 2015/2016, during the rainy season for the two regions with a total sample size of 250 farmers. The climatic conditions data were collected from Tanzania meteorological Agency (TMA) and NASA Agro climatology database. The study employed the Ricardian approach to analyze these impacts as it was found to be superior to the production approach since it was able to incorporate the effects of adaptations. The results from this cross sectional data show that these two regions were affected differently with the climate variables. With both regions being in the sub-tropical area, still it was observed that Iringa ‘s net revenue was significant and positively affected by the amount of temperature received at that period of study, meanwhile the amount of rainfall was found insignificant and had a positive impact to the nct revenue. Fr the case of Mbeya both climate variables had a negative impact to the net revenue. The study failed to reject the null hypothesis for some of the variables of the model such as household size, farm size and soil type. Furthermore the magnitude of the impacts of climate variables on net revenue were explained using marginal effects. The results show that these variables have a positive impact with Iringa experiencing larger impacts of climate variables compared to Mbeya. Farmers in these area have been practicing different adaptation measure like irrigation and the likes to diversify the future economic impacts that arise from the change in climate.