Environment

Evidence of climate change impacts on land use patterns-Evidence from India

In this paper we shed light on how climate change may impact land use change through differential impact on crop productivity. Specifically, we build on the rationale that land allocations are impacted by multiple factors such as weather, soils, technology, infrastructure, prices, etc. Among these factors, each crop’s optimal heat and moisture demand is different. As such the productivity impacts of climate change might be disproportionately stronger for some crops and these differential impacts might encourage farmers to reallocate land to crops that are more resilient to a changed climate. We use a two-step modelling framework where the intercrop differences in the effect of weather on yields drive land use share decisions. Our findings show that excess temperature reduces crop yields, but the extent of reduction differs across crops. This heterogeneity in the yield response to temperature transmits into farmers’ land allocation decisions but not in a significant manner. Given the limited supply of land for agriculture and dominance of risk-averse smallholder farmers, a key implication of these findings is that adjustments in land-use is not a feasible mitigation option for managing climate risks; and the recourse has to be with alternative mitigation and adaptation strategies, including crop breeding for stress-tolerance, improvements in efficiency and sustainability of natural resources, conservation agriculture and manipulations of agronomic practices and input applications.

India Farmers' risk management choices, their determinants and impacts: Evidence from India

The subject of risk in agricultural production is very pertinent and touches on various aspects such as investments, food security and income levels of farm households. Unmanaged, risks can have profound impacts on the agricultural sector and also hinder long-term economic growth. Furthermore, risk management by farm households is diverse with different cost and benefit implications. This paper focuses on the effectiveness of the various risk management strategies employed by farm households to identify which optimal strategy allows households to maximize expected income and reduce risk.

We employ a multinomial endogenous switching regression, that accounts for selectivity bias, and a moment-based approach to determine the impacts of various risk management strategies on agriculture incomes and risk of crop failure.

The findings show that farmers, based on their expectations on the occurrence of extreme climatic events and their expected impacts on income, adopt a combination of strategies for de-risking agriculture. Controlling for the effects of several covariates and selection bias, due to observed and unobserved factors, the adoption of risk management strategies positively impacts farm income and reduces inter-farm variability and downside risk exposure. Different risk management strategies, however, differ in their potential impacts, and larger impacts come from more complex portfolios.

India Impacts of climatic hazards on agricultural growth in India

The increasing frequency of natural hazards has spurred considerable interest among economists to systematically investigate their impacts on economic growth and its social consequences to provide evidence-based feedback to policymakers for prioritization and efficient targeting of the efforts and investments to manage their adverse effects. In this paper, we assess the impacts of four important climatic hazards, viz., droughts, floods, heat-waves and cold-waves that are more relevant to agriculture and agriculture-based livelihoods, occur more frequently, and have a wider spatial spread as compared to other natural hazards such as landslides and wildfires. Simultaneously, we also evaluate the contribution of a few important adaptation measures such as irrigation, agricultural diversification and manipulation of agronomic practices in mitigating the negative growth impacts of climatic hazards.

Our findings show that climatic hazards negatively impact the agricultural growth, but the different climatic hazards have differential impacts. Droughts and heat-waves have a larger negative effect, especially in the low-income and pre-dominantly agrarian states. However, the negative growth effects can be reduced through adaptations such as irrigation, crop diversification, and agronomic management of inputs, and animal husbandry. Irrigation and crop diversification provide more adaptation benefits against droughts and heat-waves, but these decline considerably in case of their rising frequency. Livestock and fertilizer-use, on the other hand, provide comparatively small but sustainable adaptation benefits.

Adaptation benefits of irrigation against heat-stress: Evidence from India’s wheat production system

In the recent past, terminal heat-stress has emerged a major climatic risk to agriculture in India. This paper, using a panel of highly disaggregated district-level data for a period of 45 years, has assessed the impact of terminal heat-stress on wheat production, and concurrently evaluated the role of irrigation in mitigating its adverse impact.

The findings show that heat-stress adversely impacts crop yield, and the impact has accentuated over time. on average, the heat-stress is estimated to reduce wheat yield by 2.8%. Nonetheless, the irrigation, besides contributing to yield improvement, also cushions the impact of heat-stress, reducing its negative impact by about 16%. The adaptation benefits of irrigation have slowed down over time. Given an acute scarcity of irrigation water and predictions of increasing frequency of heat-waves in the plausible future climate scenarios, these findings suggest the need for a greater emphasis on breeding for heat-tolerance, and improving water-use efficiency.