India has been suffering from significant impacts of climate change, from high temperatures to flooding rains. Each year, we hear of more records being broken from an ever increasing number of cities experiencing temperatures above 45°C, excess deaths directly caused by this, and the subsequent actions taken amid the climate crisis — from water rationing to banning public gatherings.
Maxine Nelson
In addition to its direct impacts on people, climate change is causing significant disruptions to food production, and these effects are felt well beyond India.
According to the Centre for Science and Environment, extreme weather events have occurred on about 90% of days from January to September in the last few years, as shown in Figure 1. In 2024, 3.2 million hectares of land with crops were affected by these events and nearly 10,000 livestock were killed.
Figure 1: Extreme Weather Events in India, January to September 2024
Source: Centre for Science and Environment, Climate India 2024: An Assessment of Extreme Weather Events
For this study the India Meteorological Department (IMD) definition of extreme weather events has been used. IMD classifies lightning and thunderstorms, heavy to very heavy, and extremely heavy rainfall, landslides and floods, coldwaves, heatwaves, cyclones, snowfall, dust and sandstorms, squalls, hailstorms and gales as extreme weather events.
Understanding the Agricultural Impact in India
Impacts on agriculture have been occurring for many years. The banking regulator, Reserve Bank of India (RBI), has stated that “India has witnessed changes in climatic patterns in line with the rest of the world… the rainfall pattern, particularly with respect to the [south west monsoon] SWM, which provides around 75% of the annual rainfall, has undergone significant changes. Moreover, the occurrence of extreme weather events like floods/unseasonal rainfall, heat waves and cyclones has increased during the past two decades, and data reveal that some of the key agricultural states in India have been the most affected by such events.”
As well as affecting food production, the extreme weather in agricultural states impacts employment and the economy, with agriculture the primary source of livelihood for approximately 58% of the population, and agriculture and allied sectors contributing about 18% of gross value added (GVA). Several challenges confront Indian agriculture, including reduced availability of land and water, deteriorating soil health in many regions, yield stagnation, pests and diseases, and unprecedented climate change. These need to be tackled for the long-term sustainability and viability of agriculture in the country.
Of the 787 districts in India, 109 have very high climate risk and 201 have high climate change risk, as per Figure 2. Major causes of the risk are low access to irrigation, high numbers of droughts, cyclones or floods, an increase in the minimum temperature, small farm size, and high-value assets located where hazards occur.
Figure 2: Risk from Climate Change Affecting Agriculture 2020-2049
Source: India Third National Communication and Initial Adaptation Communication
It has been estimated that without adaptation, rain-fed rice yields will fall 20% by 2050, wheat yields by 19% and maize by 18%. To add to that already significant problem, climate change also reduces the nutritional value of the produce.
What Happens in India Doesn’t Stay in India
When India’s food-producing regions have been affected by extreme weather, or there is a concern that they will be affected, the country has acted to protect its own food supply by placing restrictions on agricultural exports, which will impact other countries — potentially in a severe manner.
Take rice as an example. India is the largest rice exporter, providing 40% of the world's exports. More than half of the rice imports in around 42 countries originate from India, and in many African nations, India's market share of rice imports surpasses 80%. In July 2023, worried about threats to rice production and increasing food inflation, a ban on the export of Indian non-basmati white rice was introduced. (Other types of rice already had export restrictions, such as export duties and minimum export prices imposed on them.) This led to a 34% reduction in total rice exports, causing a significant increase in the price in many countries and was particularly detrimental to people in developing countries that get a large proportion of their calories from rice.
In 2023, wheat, onions and sugar were also subject to various restrictions, ranging from export taxes and minimum export prices to restrictions on the amount of produce exported. According to the East Asia Forum, this contributed to sugar prices reaching their highest level ever.
New Agricultural Strategies Amid Climate Change
In response to these reductions in food availability and surging prices, several strategies have been implemented to adapt Indian agricultural practices to the changing climate conditions, such as:
- Crop diversification, away from rice towards other crops, which not only relieves pressure on water supplies but also helps improve soil quality and the incidence of pests and disease
- Crops being bred to be more tolerant to heat, drought, flood and salinity
- Changing the sowing time for cereal and millet crops, and increasing their heat tolerance, plus improving water and nutrient management
- Using chickpeas and mustard plants that required shorter growing periods — and can therefore be harvested sooner
- Changing the planting time of potatoes
In addition to changing how individual crops are grown, more wide-ranging changes to agricultural production are also occurring, for example:
- Using efficient irrigation systems to deliver water directly to plant roots, which not only improves on-farm water management but also reduces the amount of water needed
- New types of crop management, for example sowing seeds to avoid water stress in monsoon crops, zero-till sowing to avoid inter-plant competition, and mulching rather than burning of crop residues to conserve soil moisture and soil organic carbon
- Altering how rice crops are grown by seeding rice directly in fields (rather than growing rice in nurseries and then planting it in the field) and using drought-tolerant varieties
These changes should not only allow farmers to adapt to the changing climate, but also improve their income, and in many cases reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. For example, seeding rice on location reduces greenhouse gas emissions by about 40%.
Parting Thoughts
Reducing emissions is important not only because Indian agriculture is being detrimentally affected by climate change, but because it is also a large contributor to it; agriculture is the second highest emitting sector, behind electricity production, plus it uses about 20% of the produced electricity, according to the Third National Communication to the UNFCCC.
However, due to its importance in maintaining food and nutritional security this sector is not included in India’s emission reduction targets.
It is critical that changes to agricultural practices continue not just to allow large volumes of crops to continue to grow — as important as that is — but also that the new practices continue to help India lower its greenhouse gas emissions.
There are already strategies for reducing agricultural-related emissions, such as the installation of two million standalone solar-powered agricultural pumps. These types of initiatives will increase agricultural productivity and help India achieve both a net-zero economy and increase the resilience to climate change, thereby helping India to grow sufficient food for its own population as well as many other countries.
Dr. Maxine Nelson, Senior Vice President, GARP Risk Institute, currently focuses on sustainability, climate and nature risk management. She has extensive experience in risk, capital and regulation gained from a wide variety of roles across firms including Head of Wholesale Credit Analytics at HSBC. She also worked at the U.K. Financial Services Authority, where she was responsible for counterparty credit risk during the last financial crisis.
Topics: Physical Risk, Climate Risk Management, Nature Risk Management
