Question

Climate change and food security in india

Answer 1

Impact on climate change and food security in INDIA as three dimension :
- availability
- accessibility
-absorption

Answer 2

Climate change has added to the enormity of India’s food security challenges. While the relationship between climate change and food security is complex, most studies focus on one dimension of food security, i.e., food availability. This paper provides an overview of the impact of climate change on India’s food security, keeping in mind three dimensions — availability, access, and absorption. It finds that ensuring food security in the face of climate change will be a formidable challenge and recommends, among others, the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices, greater emphasis on urban food security and public health, provision of livelihood security, and long-term relief measures in the event of natural disasters.




Food production

Climate change presents an additional stress on India’s long-term food security challenges as it affects food production in many ways. For one, it may cause significant increases in inter-annual and intra-seasonal variability of monsoon rainfall. According to World Bank estimates, based on the International Energy Agency’s current policy scenario and other energy sector economic models, for a global mean warming of 4°C, there will be a 10-percent increase in annual mean monsoon intensity and a 15-percent increase in year-to-year variability in monsoon precipitation. [xii]  The World Bank (2013) also predicts that droughts will pose an increasing risk in the north-western part of India while southern India will experience an increase in wetness. [xiii]

Indian agriculture, and thereby India’s food production, is highly vulnerable to climate change largely because the sector continues to be highly sensitive to monsoon variability. After all, about 65 percent of India’s cropped area is rain-fed. Figure 2 shows that most districts with very high and high vulnerability to climate change are in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh. Wheat and rice, two crops central to nutrition in India, have been found to be particularly sensitive to climate change. Lobell et al (2012) found that wheat growth in northern India is highly sensitive to temperatures greater than 34°C. [xix] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report of 2007 echoed similar concerns on wheat yield: a 0.5°C rise in winter temperature is likely to reduce wheat yield by 0.45 tonnes per hectare in India. [xx] Acute water shortage conditions, together with thermal stress, will affect rice productivity even more severely. 

Food access

While there has been considerable progress in understanding the sensitivities of crop production to yield, there are relatively few models which assess the impact of climate change on access to food. According to the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, depending on the climate change scenario, 200 to 600 million more people globally could suffer from hunger by 2080 (Yohe et al., 2007). [xxiii] Lloyd et al (2011) also make the projection that climate change will have significant effects on future undernutrition, even when the beneficial effects of economic growth are taken into account. [xxiv] According to their model predictions, there will be a 62-percent increase in severe stunting in South Asia and a 55-percent increase in east and south sub-Saharan Africa by 2050. [xxv]

It is more difficult to find similar, modelling-based studies on the impact of climate change on food access and nutrition specifically focusing on India. However, noted experts like Nira Ramachandran have underscored the importance of factoring climate change in the discourse on nutrition in the country. Ramachandran warns that climate change can slow down, and even drastically reduce, the improvements in food security and nutrition that India has managed to achieve security