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A district-level analysis for measuring the effects of climate change on production of rice: evidence from Southern India

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Abstract

Climate change may cause adverse impact on agricultural production that could jeopardize food availability and security. In this paper, we investigate how changes in mean values and variability of weather variables may affect rice yield using panel data for 30 districts of Tamil Nadu State from 1971 to 2018. We estimate a fixed-effects regression model with panel-corrected standard errors. Results show that rainfall and temperature have a statistically significant impact on rice yield. Furthermore, weather variability, measured as standard deviations of temperature and rainfall, has a negative effect on rice yields. We use the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project-5 outputs and dynamically downscaled the weather outputs using the regional climate model. The results of the climate model showed that the rise in temperature and disruptions in rainfall patterns including both excessive and deficient rainfall events in Tamil Nadu will continue in the future under different climate scenarios. Projected changes in the weather variables are likely to decrease rice yield in Tamil Nadu from 0.7 to 6.3% under the low emission scenario and 4.1 to 20.1% in the high emission scenario during 2022–2050 (relative to 1971–2018). These projections have implications for the planning and targeting of climate adaptation technologies such as drought-tolerant and flood-tolerant varieties to lessen the adverse impact of weather variability due to climate change in the future.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to data supply on payment basis but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

  1. This output was available for different latitudes and longitudes within every 25 km2 of Tamil Nadu. Overlaying district maps on this grid, we identified climatic data for each district to make a panel dataset of climate change projections. We added predicted absolute change in temperature and multiplied the predicted percentage change in precipitation to weather station-based baseline climate in each district (Auffhammer et al. 2013; Kurukulasuriya and Mendelsohn 2008; Saravanakumar 2015).

  2. Cauvery Delta Zone (CDZ) lies in the eastern part of Tamilnadu. It is bounded by the Bay of Bengal on the east and palk straight on the south, Trichy district on the west, Perambalur, Ariyalur districts on the north west, Cuddalore district on the north and Pudukkottai district on the south west. Cauvery delta zone has a total geographical land area or 14.47 lakh hectare, of which, rice crop is grown under 25% of total area. Thanjavur district of this zone is called “The Rice Bowl of Tamil Nadu”.

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Funding

This work was financially supported by the South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics (SANDEE), ICIMOD, Nepal.

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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by V. Saravanakumar, Heman Das Lohano, and R. Balasubramanian. The first draft of the manuscript was written by V. Saravanakumar and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Venkatachalam Saravanakumar.

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Saravanakumar, V., Lohano, H.D. & Balasubramanian, R. A district-level analysis for measuring the effects of climate change on production of rice: evidence from Southern India. Theor Appl Climatol 150, 941–953 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-04198-y

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