Abstract
The Dooars region of West Bengal in India is a major tea producing region that contributes around 25% of the national tea yield. Changes in weather patterns along with the increased frequency of drought, storms, flood, etc. are likely to affect the tea industry adversely as tea production is reliant on the climate of the tea-growing region. In spite of the tea industry being the primary contributor of the Dooars economy, to date, the impact of climatic variables on tea yield in Dooars region remains unexplored. Here, we have developed a panel dataset that includes monthly data of the tea gardens of Dooars region over a 10-year period and statistically analysed the effects of climatic variables including temperature, precipitation, drought intensity, magnitude of warm-wet condition and precipitation intensity on tea yield. Overall, our seasonal analysis suggested that higher temperature during summer and monsoon seasons affected tea yield. Contrastingly, higher temperature during winter months and summer and winter rainfall were found to be beneficial for the increase in tea yield. An excessive and sporadic rainfall and a combination of hotter and wetter weather condition during monsoon months had a detrimental effect on tea yield. Finally, projections using climate models under different emission scenario predicted reduction of monsoon production under extreme carbon emission. The analyses and predictions of our study will be beneficial for tea garden managers of Dooars region in particular and northern India in general in adopting strategies to prevent the tea plantations from being affected due to climate change.
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Data availability
The panel dataset used in this study is available upon request. The climate model projections are freely available from Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF)—Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/projects/esgf-llnl/).
Code availability
The codes for statistical analyses performed in this study were implemented in R v3.6.3. The custom R scripts are available upon request.
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Acknowledgements
This study would not have been possible without the permission, cooperation and assistance in data collection extended by the managers of the selected tea estates, personnel of the Dooars Branch Indian Tea Association (DBITA) and Tea Research Association, Nagrakata (TRA). The authors are grateful to Dr. Lalu Das and Dr. Javed Akhtar for their valuable inputs regarding climate model analyses. The authors also thank Mr. A. Rajan and Mr. Biman Saha from Tea Board of India (Kolkata) and Mr. Saunak Mitra of Goodricke Group Limited for their help during the entire course of this study.
Funding
This work was partially funded by Swami Vivekananda Single Girl Child Scholarship conducted by University Grants Commission (UGC) to P.M.
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P.M and T.G designed the overall plan of the study. P.M collected the data, performed data analysis and prepared the figures and tables. Both the authors wrote the manuscript and approved the final version.
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Mallik, P., Ghosh, T. Impact of climate on tea production: a study of the Dooars region in India. Theor Appl Climatol 147, 559–573 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-021-03848-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-021-03848-x