The Conversation published an article by Joachim De Weerdt, Channing Arndt, James Thurlow, Jan Duchoslav, Joseph Glauber, Liangzhi You, and Weston Anderson. The article looked at possible weather pattern changes driven by El Niño – an unusual warming of surface waters in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean – and their impact on maize production in Malawi. This was done by developing a model from historical district crop data and El Niño events since the 1980s. Econometric modelling, which uses statistics and mathematics, is useful in studying the cause and effect of relationships, in the case of weather patterns. Historically, two out of every three El Niño events have coincided with reduced maize harvests of, on average, 22.5%.
Read the full article here.
This article is based on Policy Note 51: Mitigating the impact of El Niño on hunger in Malawi. Read and download the policy note here (PDF 226KB).
