Detecting and Quantifying Structural Breaks in Climate

Abstract

Structural breaks have attracted considerable attention recently, especially in light of the financial crisis, Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, and war. While structural breaks pose significant econometric challenges, machine learning provides an incisive tool for detecting and quantifying breaks. The current paper presents a unified framework for analyzing breaks; and it implements that framework to test for and quantify changes in precipitation in Mauritania over 1919–1997. These tests detect a decline of one third in mean rainfall, starting around 1970. Because water is a scarce resource in Mauritania, this decline—with adverse consequences on food production—has potential economic and policy consequences.