Did the Israeli Assault on Gaza Compound the Effects of Climate Change on the Agricultural Sector?

Capstone research for the MA in Development Economics — School of Economics, Administration and Public Policy, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Not published in a peer-reviewed journal. The full text is in Arabic and available from the top of this page.

Research question

Agriculture's share in Gaza has fallen across major economic indicators — output, employment and exports — for familiar reasons: higher wages and profits outside the sector, less physically demanding work elsewhere, the seasonality of farm labour, population growth against shrinking cultivated area, poverty among farmers, and scarce irrigation water with the production costs that follow.

The study asks a further question: did Israeli bombardment compound the effect of climate change itself on the sector?

Method

The study is econometric, at governorate level, using:

• The SPEI drought index at 3-month and 6-month accumulation periods as the measure of climate stress
• The NDVI vegetation index as a proxy for vegetation cover and agricultural condition
• Data on agricultural land damaged by bombardment, disaggregated by means of attack
• Mean temperature and rainfall data by governorate

Marginal effects of 3- and 6-month drought conditions on NDVI were estimated.

Findings

• Gaza's governorates experience climate-change effects to differing degrees.
• There is an inverse relationship between the drought index and the vegetation index: as drought intensifies, vegetated area contracts.
• Israeli bombardment of agricultural land compounded the effect of climate change and contributed independently to the contraction of vegetation cover.

Structure

Geography and the state of agriculture (contribution to output and employment) · agriculture and climate change · agriculture and bombardment · methodology and data sources · descriptive and econometric results · conclusion and appendices.

The paper contains 8 tables and 12 figures, including population-density and topographic maps.