Climate Change and Crop Yields in India

With an exhausting land frontier, raising agricultural production to meet future global demand for food is highly contingent on higher crop yields. Yet, continued yield growth is increasingly threatened by climate change. This paper presents new evidence on significant effects of climate change on yields across ten major crops for 563 districts of India over half a century. The impacts are larger than those in the literature not only for India, but also relative to global benchmarks. Larger impacts are attributable to our use of a dynamic specification to capture persistence and to making an allowance for nonlinearity of marginal effects. We estimate 1◦C higher temperature reduces the national average all-crop yield by 8%. For individual crops, yield losses are as high as 16% for maize and 19% for pearl millet. For individual districts, they range from under 1% to 39%

Gaurav Datt and Shreekant Gupt co-authored the paper.

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The findings were also covered in this article by Down To Earth.