Drought risks and water scarcity are expected to intensify as a result of human-induced climate change and could pose threats to the stability of the domestic agri-food markets. Some areas in Europe, notably the Mediterranean countries, are more prone to prolonged drought spells than others. Understandingand properly measuring the overall and crop-wide economic impact of those episodes at the geographically most disaggregated level is a pre-requisite to design mechanisms and policies that could  ght against these adverse scenarios. Spain, because of its size and, climatic conditions and agricultural variety, represents a convenient research eld to extract meaningful messages that could be extrapolated to a European-wideframework. In this study we bene t from the ESYRCE gridded data set on crop yields and surfaces spanning from 1990 to 2015 to estimate the reactivity of non-irrigated crops to di erent drought stress levels with help of gridded weather measures and satellite-based drought indicators, the latter being a tool increasingly used for estimation of vegetation health and drought monitoring. We use Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines to capture asymmetries and interactions between yield and, weather and drought variables. We test also how the relationship between crop yields and drought intensity has evolved historically and, eventually, deliver some estimates of private adaptation to climate change.

This seminar is based on the research carried out within the project “Droughts and Water Scarcity in the EU: Economic Impact, Adaptation, Policy Implications and Integrated Assessment Modelling — WATER DROP”. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 705408.