5/5 Bottom line:
🌿 Farmers are adapting to climate change in the medium run.
💼 But these adaptations carry costs—especially for rural labor.
🔥 And new challenges like wildfires loom.
Policy must support both adaptation and resilience.

4/5 Wildfires also play a role.
I document a strong link between extreme heat and wildfire outbreaks—especially in forestry-heavy areas.
So while land reallocation helps mitigate climate impacts, it also creates new risks. 🔥🌲

3/5 Why does this happen?
Because fruit farming is very labor-intensive. When heat lowers productivity, land shifts toward more heat-resilient crops—like pine or eucalyptus.
But displaced workers don’t reallocate easily, and there’s no offsetting rise in manufacturing jobs. 😞

2/5 Using farm-level census data and detailed weather records, I show that extreme heat pushes land out of fruit crops (which are labor-intensive) and into cereals and forestry (more land-intensive).
This shift helps sustain agricultural output—but leads to job losses and reduced capital use. 🌡️🍇🌲

How do farmers respond to climate change?
In my forthcoming paper in the JDE, I study adaptation to extreme heat in Chile—a country not as hot as India, Peru, or Brazil.
I find that farmers adapt by reallocating land away from fruit production.
But this comes with tradeoffs. 👇