Climate Change Impact on Major Food and Non-food Crops: A Study of Assam, India
摘要
Recent studies have established that climate change is impacting the agriculture sector and following extreme events, there are reports of higher crop loss and damages. In using data from 1980 to 2021 for the Indian state of Assam, we examined how the production of major food and non-food crops have been affected by climate change in general and floods in particular. The food crops selected and analysed are rice, wheat, coarse cereal, and potato and the non-food crops are jute, sugarcane, oilseeds, and cotton. Following existing literature, and the nature of the data, which is time series in characteristics, we used the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to understand how rainfall, maximum and minimum temperatures have an impact on crop output. Minimum temperature positively impacts coarse cereals and oilseeds, while negatively impact cotton production in the short run. Maximum temperature, on the contrary, shows a negative impact on oilseed production. Also, we observed that the total area under cultivation has a significant impact on short-run production, except for cotton, where there is a long-term positive impact. These findings have implications for crop specific climate adaptation.