# **1 Introduction**

Climate change is causing widespread impacts across the globe, and the latest UN Climate Change Report notes that risks will escalate exponentially, often causing irreversible impacts IPCC (2022). Afghanistan, which experiences an arid to semi-arid climate, has been facing extreme weather conditions in the recent decades.<sup>1</sup> Although less than 12 percent area is cultivable in the mountainous country, over two-thirds of the population depends on agriculture for their livelihood. The country has also been torn by incessant conflict for over 40 years, rendering its institutions fragile and its people highly dependent on humanitarian assistance. In 2019-20, 47 percent of the population was classified as poor, which represents a doubling of the poverty rate since 2006. Extreme weather events are likely to push people further into poverty, especially when most people can barely make ends meet and have little access to safety nets.

In this context, we study the effects of weather shocks in Afghanistan, mainly focusing on the effects of the 2018 drought on measures of consumption and poverty. We focus on the 2018 drought for two reasons. First, the 2018 drought was dubbed the worst drought in two decades and affected 22 of the 34 provinces in the country. About 13.5 million Afghan people faced heightened food insecurity in 2018, with lost livelihoods, livestock deaths, and forced displacement into urban areas (FAO, 2019).<sup>2</sup> Second, a nationally representative geo-coded household survey, the Integrated Expenditure and Labor Force Survey (IE-LFS), was administered right after the drought year, in 2019-20, enabling us to study the effects of the drought in the last growing season on household consumption.

There are multiple mechanisms whereby drought can affect household consumption in Afghanistan, where 76% of households live in rural areas and 46% of workers are in agriculture (NSIA, 2020). Grains and bread, primarily wheat, constitute 73% of calories consumed. Drought adversely affects farmers’ agricultural yields, reducing the availability of food for own consumption and surplus that can be sold. The risk associated with a bad harvest can also disincentivize productive investments, leaving farmers stuck in a low productivity poverty trap (Barrett and Carter, 2013). For non-farmers, reduced local

> 1The last two decades have seen two droughts a decade. `https://borgenproject.org/ the-drought-in-afghanistan/` While the precipitation rates have not changed dramatically over the whole of Afghanistan in the past decades, the drier conditions have become more extreme over the years: annual mean temperatures have increased since 1950 by 1.8 degrees Celsius warming across the country (NEPA and UN Environment, 2016). At the same time, climate predictions indicate a rise in flooding events in the country (rather than a decrease in precipitation), which are likely to be restricted to some northeast parts that receive rains. The mean annual temperatures are also expected to rise by 2 degrees Celsius by 2050, thereby intensifying warming (NEPA and UN Environment, 2016), which is expected to dry up drinking water and irrigation sources at an accelerated pace.

> 2https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature/2021/6/2/as-drought-looms-afghanistanfaces-another-migration-crisis

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