Agriculture has always been vulnerable to climate variability, while the variations in crops and cultivation practices across the world offer some of the most striking examples of human adaptation to climatic conditions. The impact of projected changes in climate due to anthropogenic global warming is therefore a critical issue for agriculture.

In 2014, a paper, “Climate Change and Agriculture: Current and Future Trends, and Implications for India,” was published in our open access journal, Review of Agrarian Studies.

This paper covered three major aspects of the issue of climate change and agriculture at the time – significant advances in climate science that are relevant to understanding the impact of global warming on agriculture, the significance of climate variability both in the present and in the future for agricultural production, and some implications of these for the study of the economic impact of climate change. In doing so, it also focused on the need to understand the differential impact of climate change on agriculture across both spatial and temporal scales, and different socio-economic strata of producers.

Ten years since the paper, much has changed in this field – more studies have appeared, new narratives around agriculture and climate change have emerged, and the politics around sustainability has changed markedly. There is an increasing burden of climate mitigation being placed on agriculture today, the scientific, socio-economic and normative grounds of which are contested.

In this context, the Foundation, in collaboration with Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS), organised the online public lecture, “Climate Change and Agriculture in India: Making Sense of the Debates,” to take stock of the changes that have happened in the last decade, since the publication of the paper. Professor T Jayaraman, Senior Fellow – Climate Change, M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai, and co-author of the 2014 paper, delivered the lecture on Thursday, May 11, 2023.

Dr Vinod Kumar Singh, Director, ICAR – Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture, Chaired the lecture.

While summarizing some of the most striking new developments in the study of the impact of global warming on agriculture, with special reference to India, the lecture drew attention to three important issues. The first is the increasing domination of the conservation agenda in agriculture in the policy discourse with the relative neglect of the productivity agenda and its link to the increasing mitigation-centric approach in climate and agriculture. The second is the embracing of the conservation agenda by multilateral institutions and the aid agencies of the global North. The third is the challenge of adaptation and the nexus between the development and adaptation agendas in agriculture.

An engaging session of Q&A followed the lecture.