Climate change impacts and vulnerability of fallow-chickpea based farm households in India: Assessment using Integrated modeling approach

Abstract

The rainfed farming in India is characterized by low productivity, frequent weather variability, policy bias, poor market and infrastructure and degraded natural resources, which leads to low farm income and farm households vulnerability. Along with these challenges, changing climate and socio-economic conditions in the future are serious threat to the rainfed farming and household farm profitability. In this paper we use the AgMIP Regional Integrated Assessment (RIA) methods which integrates climate, crop and economic modeling to assess potential impacts of climate change on economic vulnerability of farm households, average farm net returns and poverty in semi-arid region of Andhra Pradesh, India. This study used the socio-economic data from representative household survey, together with down-scaled climate data, site-specific crop model simulations. The simulation results shows that the majority of fallow-chickpea based farm households are vulnerable (68% in warmer climate and 42% in wet climate) to climate change if current production systems are used in the future. Vulnerability is not uniform across the Kurnool district and climate impacts vary across climate scenarios. Therefore, development and promotion of location specific adaptation strategies linking technologies, policies and infrastructure is need to improve the resilience and adaptive capacity of farm rainfed farm households to climate change. Acknowledgement : This research was funded by Agricultural Model Inter-comparison and Improvement Project (AGMIP, www.agmip.org) and acknowledge for the contribution on the methodology. The opinions expressed here belong to the authors, and do not necessarily reflect those of ICRISAT or CGIAR.