# 4. CONCLUSION

Climate volatility in Tanzania could increase in the future as greenhouse gas concentrations increase (Figure 1, Table 2), with agricultural productivity expected to become increasingly volatile as well. For agriculture‐dependant developing countries, where poverty is sensitive to food production and food production is sensitive to climate (as is the case in Tanzania), rising climate volatility could have important implications for poverty vulnerability.

We develop an analytical framework which allows us to estimate the interannual changes in grains sector productivity that can be attributed solely to temperature and precipitation. We then simulate these interannual changes in a comparative static general equilibrium simulation model, to derive the poverty responses of the 2001 Tanzanian economy to each of these changes. This enables us to determine how the distribution of poverty changes attributable to climate volatility in a given 30‐year period could change in the future. We apply this framework to Tanzania’s climate in the 20<sup>th</sup> Century and 21<sup>st</sup> Century, and find that changes in climate volatility are likely to render Tanzanians increasingly vulnerable to poverty episodes through its impacts on staple grains production in agriculture.

Under scenarios with the greatest increase in precipitation volatility and the largest changes in temperature volatility the median climate outcome in the future may lead to 24.3 to 89.7 thousand additional poor than the median poverty outcome under current climate. Individual GCM results show climate‐induced interannual poverty increases as high as 700,000 in some cases. Further, since there is the possibility that climate volatility could increase further as greenhouse gas concentrations rise beyond those prescribed here, there is a danger that the poverty vulnerability identified could intensify beyond the horizon of our analysis.

Several factors not considered in the current study may also be important for refining adaptation strategies to adapt to climate impacts in Tanzania. One is that crops may be more or less sensitive than the values inferred by our yield estimation, as these statistical estimates are subject to some uncertainty. Although most studies, including this one, focus on uncertainties in climate scenarios, uncertainties in crop responses can be equally important for projecting near‐ term impacts (Lobell and Burke, 2008).

In addition, food prices in Tanzania will be affected to a large degree by changes in crop productivity throughout the world, as these will influence local prices. The current analysis implicitly assumed negligible impacts in other regions, as a way of focusing on the question of how much poverty volatility could be driven by changes in local production. Through international price transmission, climate outcomes in other countries would also affect prices in Tanzania. Without understanding how climate affects international prices, the Tanzanian poverty impacts of climate volatility remain ambiguous. International linkages are thus clearly important for projecting poverty changes (Hertel et al, 2009c), and will be incorporated into future work.

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