Agro-climatic Variability in Climate Change Scenario: Adaptive Approach and Sustainability

Abstract

Agriculture is the key component to support the ever-increasing population across the globe. However, the natural resources supporting agriculture, most importantly land and water resources, are shrinking at a rapid rate. Land degradation is rampant across different parts of the world, and the vagaries of climate change threaten the agricultural production. Extreme weather events in the form of increased rainfall intensity, changes in rainfall pattern, shift in the rainfall duration, increased temperature regime and more natural calamities like flood and drought threaten agricultural production. The different agro-climatic zones (ACZs) in the country face diverse challenges due to the changing climate particularly with reference to the agriculture in the area. Under climate change scenario, the increasing temperature is likely to reduce the C gain by majority crop plants due to increased respiration rates, which will have an adverse impact on crop yield. Thus, diversification of agriculture is necessary to sustain the production. Water management and input management through sensors or precision agriculture is an important tool to combat climate change. Reduced tillage practices, crop residue retention, biochar, land management through laser levelling, micro-irrigation systems, etc., are part of mitigation and climate-proofing strategies which have been highlighted in this chapter. Also, assessing the suitability of different crops in future climate change scenarios through crop simulation models like APSIM and DSSAT is important to know how they will fare in the future. This chapter highlights the impact of climate change on Indian agriculture in particular and the various mitigation and climate-proofing techniques adopted at different scales and how sustainable they are in the future scenarios.