Climate Change, Weather Anomalies, and Agriculture: Impact on Output of Major Crops in India

Abstract

The fact that climate change will have an impact on agriculture productivity is well known and many studies, both in India and globally, have documented its impact on specific crops. However, few studies have attempted to develop a method to estimate the impact of changes in temperature and rainfall on a range of crops. One of the reasons for this is a lack of comparable data. Fortunately, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and the Tata Cornell Institute (TCI) have made available district-level data that covers almost the whole of India with reference to the agricultural productivity of all major crops. From there we chose major crops including wheat, rice, maize, sorghum, pearl millet, sugarcane, cotton, chickpea, pigeon pea, groundnut, rapeseed and mustard, and oilseeds for our study. We take temperature and rainfall anomalies, which are divergences over the long-term (1966 to 2017) average values and assess their impact on crop yields over the same period (during which both temperature increases and rain volatility are well assessed). Across different specifications and methods, and undertaking robustness corrections, our panel data finds that rain and temperature anomalies affect yields negatively across almost all crops, both significantly and consistently. We find that the availability of greater data makes it possible to assess a large set of crops over a long period of time, and therefore, greater data points can yield highly robust results.