Impact of climatic and non-climatic factors on shrimp production: Empirical evidence from Bangladesh

Abstract

Shrimp is the largest aquaculture species in Bangladesh by value, and it is also the largest species in terms of export value. However, due to the impacts of climate change, the sustainability of shrimp production is jeopardized. In this study, we use longitudinal data from 1990 to 2020 to investigate the impact of climatic factors such as annual temperature, precipitation, CO₂ emissions, and salinity, as well as non-climatic factors such as gross cultivated areas, availability of credit, labor availability, and the export price of shrimp. A recently developed dynamic autoregressive distributed lag (DARDL) and augmented ARDL model are used for the methodological approach. The results show that temperature, precipitation, and CO₂ emissions all have a detrimental effect, whereas soil salinity has a significant favorable influence on shrimp production in the long run. Cultivated lands availability of credit, and the export price of shrimp, on the other hand, all have a favorable and significant impact on shrimp production in both the long and short term.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• shrimp production
• coastal Bangladesh
• export price of shrimp

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the ECOPRAWN project (‘Climate-friendly and climate-resilient prawn farming in Bangladesh’ which is funded by DANIDA, numbered DFC File No. 21-01-KU for funding the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Farmers have an incentive to keep a higher water quality in the farm as it affects productivity (Hukom et al., 2020b), however, water quality can be affected by the location of the farm on a river (Jensen et al. 2023), which can be mitigated by cooperation between farmers (Hukom et al., 2022).

2 This study exclusively relied on formal sources of credit and was unable to incorporate additional types of credit, such as equity, trade credit, and informal finance, due to data availability constraints. Subsequent investigations can encompass all forms of credit depending on the accessibility of data.

3 There is a global market for shrimp with a common price determination process (Asche et al., 2022b), although there is significant price variation for different product attributes (Hukom et al., 2020b; Smith et al., 2017).