The adverse effects of climate change are likely to harm agricultural livelihoods and food supplies worldwide. Faced with challenges resulting from increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, some farmers might abandon their occupations. Existing research has found that drier than usual weather reduces landownership rates through these pathways. Such trends could be disruptive at a population level, threatening a country’s economic and political stability. We analyze subnational agricultural landownership data that cover 50 countries on four continents between 2004 and 2017. Our Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) dataset speaks to the experiences of 1,123,714 households. Our predictor of environmental stress is the growing season standardized precipitation-evapotranspiration index, which measures deviations from local weather patterns dating back to 1901. We find that drier than average growing season weather is associated with declining landownership rates. For every dry growing season before a DHS survey, the agricultural landownership rate falls by 2.51%. This effect is most robust in African countries, which was the focus of a recent study on this topic, and we offer several plausible interpretations of these regional differences.

气候变化的不利影响可能会损害全世界的农业生计和粮食供应。面对日益不可预测的天气模式带来的挑战，一些农民可能会放弃他们的职业。现有研究发现，比平时干燥的天气会通过这些途径降低土地所有权率。这种趋势可能会对人口造成破坏，威胁到一个国家的经济和政治稳定。我们分析了 2004 年至 2017 年间覆盖四大洲 50 个国家的地方农业土地所有权数据。我们的人口与健康调查 (DHS) 数据集反映了 1,123,714 个家庭的经历。我们对环境压力的预测是生长季节标准化降水蒸散指数，它衡量自 1901 年以来当地天气模式的偏差。我们发现，生长季天气比平均干燥与土地拥有率下降有关。在国土安全部调查之前的每个干旱生长季节，农业土地所有权率都会下降 2.51%。这种影响在非洲国家最为强烈，这是最近关于该主题的一项研究的重点，我们对这些区域差异提供了几种合理的解释。