Climate Variability and Agricultural Productivity: Case Study of Rice Yields in Northern India

Agriculture is a climate sensitive sector and provides livelihood for more than 60 percent of Indian population. There have been a large number of studies over the past decade that tried to assess the impacts due to the climate variability and climate change. This study attempts to characterize the vulnerability of a farmer to climate change and climate variability, and tries to identify the regions that are relatively more vulnerable to climate variability and change. Using two different methodologies (one borrowed from the poverty literature which defines vulnerability as expected poor yield, and another from the climate change literature that defines vulnerability as expected value of impact of shock on the yield, normalized with the region’s position with respect to the threshold yield), the study assesses the vulnerability of rice yields to temperature and rainfall fluctuations for the Northern states of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal in India. Besides comparing the results based on the two methodologies, the paper highlights the differential implications of temperature and rainfall variability on crop yields, and the importance of accounting for exposure under potential climate change scenarios in vulnerability assessments.