We examine how weather variability affects agricultural landownership rates in Africa, where at least half of the population depends on agriculture to earn a livelihood. In the absence of effective adaptation strategies, households that experience difficulties farming due to environmental stress might leave their land. With implications for demography – through migration – and political instability – when affected populations express grievances – changing landownership patterns could make existing development challenges on the continent even more difficult. We test our hypothesis that drier than average growing seasons will reduce landownership rates using Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). Our DHS dataset includes interviews with 850,961 households in 35 African countries between 2005 and 2017. Compared to regions experiencing weather near the historical average, those with five consecutive dry growing seasons before the DHS experienced a 6.93% decline in the landownership rate. For every additional dry growing season during the five years before each survey, the landownership rate fell by 1.38%. A host of robustness checks support our general conclusion that drying conditions are associated with lower landownership rates.

我们研究了气候变化如何影响非洲的农业土地拥有率，非洲至少有一半的人口依靠农业谋生。在缺乏有效的适应策略的情况下，由于环境压力而耕种困难的家庭可能会离开自己的土地。当受影响的人群表示不满时，这将对人口结构产生影响（包括移民）和政治动荡，不断变化的土地所有权模式可能使非洲大陆现有的发展挑战变得更加困难。我们使用人口统计和健康调查（DHS）检验了一个假设，即比平均生长季节更干燥的季节会降低土地拥有率。我们的DHS数据集包括2005年至2017年之间对35个非洲国家/地区的850,961户家庭的访谈。与经历接近历史平均水平的天气的地区相比，在国土安全部之前连续五个干旱生长季节的地区，土地拥有率下降了6.93％。在每次调查之前的五年中，每增加一个干旱的生长季节，土地拥有率就会下降1.38％。大量的稳健性检查支持了我们的一般结论，即干燥条件与较低的土地拥有率有关。