Development and Standardization of a Climate Vulnerability Index to Measure the Vulnerability Indices of Paddy Growers

Abstract

India is prominently recognized as the foremost producer of paddy, cultivating this crop over 47.83 million hectares and generating 135.75 million tonnes of paddy, thus playing a substantial role in the worldwide paddy output. However, there is an anticipated decline in paddy production yields due to the projected effects of climate change, estimated to range from 10% to 30% by 2030. The assessment of vulnerability will give a comprehensive picture of current and future climate change risks with more stress factors to be anticipated. It will help identify opportunities arising from climate change, and provide information on how to assess adaptive capacity and cope with uncertainty. Adaptation cannot be planned based on the climate projections; information on risk and vulnerabilities is also needed to determine how the climate interacts with socio-economic issues. Against this backdrop, the proposed research seeks to fill this crucial knowledge gap by developing and constructing vulnerability indices tailored specifically for paddy growers in India. Based on review of literature and discussion with experts, three dimensions along with indicators and sub-indicators by adopting the indicator approach method under the vulnerability indices of paddy growers due to climate change were identified. The relevancy rating score was obtained from 50 experts in the concerned area. Based on the relevancy score, 17 indicators and 65 sub-indicators of 0.80 and above were considered for inclusion in the vulnerability index. To compute the index values for each of the identified dimensions, their relative importance in the vulnerability was worked out by assignment of weights to indicators and sub-indicators under each dimension through Principal component analysis (PCA) and the findings revealed that sensitivity was observed to be in the top position (8.36), followed by exposure (8.28) and adaptive capacity (5.61) in assessing the climate vulnerability of paddy growers.