Harvesting uncertainty: Climate change and India’s agriculture

Empire of the Mind

Climate change resulting in rising temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, and extreme climate events – droughts and floods – has a direct impact on agriculture. Rising temperatures affect crop growth cycles, leading to reduced yields, and changes in rainfall patterns often cause droughts or floods. Studies by the IPCC indicate that every 1°C rise in global temperature could reduce global wheat yields by 6% and rice by 3%. Yields in tropical and subtropical regions are more adversely affected. India has already experienced declining yields in rice and wheat due to rising temperatures during critical growth stages. Some geographies, including Karnataka, dependent on rain-fed agriculture have experienced chronic droughts for years.

The ‘District-Level Climate Risk Assessment for India: Mapping Flood and Drought Risks – IPCC Framework Report 2024’ points out that 51 districts fall in the ‘Very High’ flood risk category, and 118 districts fall in the ‘High’ flood risk category; 91 districts fall in the ‘Very High’ drought risk category and 188 districts in the ‘High’ drought risk category. Thus, a quarter of India’s districts are flood-prone and 40% are drought-prone. In the absence of a coherent and holistic community response over the medium term, the reduced yields and increased production costs will drive food prices higher and imperil food security, particularly in vulnerable populations. We already see migration due to agricultural decline pressuring urban areas. Climate action and adaptation methods become especially important in India’s context. There are 146 million operational holdings (agricultural census 2015-16) in India spread across 139 million hectares of net sown area, of which 86% constitute marginal and small holdings. The agriculture sector engages an estimated 118 million cultivators and 144 million agriculture labourers.

Agriculture is particularly vulnerable to climate change, especially in rain-fed areas, making agricultural practices difficult. Its impact affects livelihoods in myriad ways: decline in agricultural productivity, deterioration in soil, and uncertainty of water resources. Hence a sense of urgency must inform climate action in agriculture. Against this backdrop, the time has come for a concerted community-wide effort to move towards regenerative agriculture – a holistic, outcome-based farming approach – with net-positive impacts on soil health, biodiversity, water resources, and farming livelihoods at the farm and community levels. The target outcomes must include a positive impact in these four areas. This is possible if science, social science, and people science come together to meet a few conditions: a shift from a practice-based agriculture policy to an outcome-based approach, the alignment of data collection and reporting guidelines, and the private sector stakeholders in agriculture working with other stakeholders to safeguard supply chain resilience. Adequate and sustained funding from the Centre to the States will constitute the sufficient condition.

Rural communities manage much of the country’s land and natural resources, provide food, bioproducts, and ecosystem services. These critical functions are jeopardised as climate change exacerbates current stressors including poverty, inequality, unemployment, and migration. Rural communities must strengthen resilience to climate change to preserve their livelihoods. Mainstreaming climate action in district development plans and a shift in emphasis to participatory implementation, engaging the community, is the way forward. The government has taken initiatives, including early warning systems, preparedness, monitoring, and policy planning, but all of these are on the supply side. Climate action can scarcely be expected to succeed if we rely on top-down approaches, not people-centric ones. While the climate change problem is global, the response must be local. A community-led planning process for climate adaptation responses is needed. But this is easier said than done: there is inadequate appreciation of the clear and present danger that extreme climate events pose, and tools, techniques, and community capacity at local levels are absent to respond to climate change. Training and empowering farmers, and the community must be the change in policy direction.

There are many challenges: Gathering socioeconomic data is difficult and costly. Commercial interests limit the collection of information, especially on farm incomes in the aggregate. The diversity of conditions across agroclimatic zones makes climate response challenging. Metrics, therefore, become context-specific and a unitary approach to measure the outcomes of regenerative agriculture does not work. Two steps that can address these challenges should be considered: Providing farmers with financial incentives, technical support, and simpler data collection methods. Second, the university system should be incentivised to undertake research to fill gaps in measuring and quantifying socioeconomic outcomes, linking them to farm-level practices, and aggregating data for policy and business decision-making. The Sixteenth Finance Commission tasked with determining revenue sharing between the Union and the states for a five-year period from April 1, 2026, would do great service to the farming community of the country if it provides a special dispensation to the states in financing climate action.