Climate Change and Agrarian Risk

Detailed chapter description

Chapter 129 examines climate change as agrarian risk. The phrase matters. Farms do not experience a global mean-temperature curve directly; they experience heat during flowering, a delayed transplanting window, a dry canal, a waterlogged field, a failed fodder crop, a damaged road, a higher pump bill or a price shock after regional crop loss. Climate change alters the probability and intensity of some hazards, but economic loss appears through exposure and vulnerability created by landholding, irrigation, tenancy, credit, labour, seed systems, markets and public institutions. A social-economic history must therefore connect meteorology to the farm household rather than treating weather statistics as self-explanatory. The recent evidence is unusually instructive. The India Meteorological Department reported that 2025 was India's eighth warmest year since 1901, with annual mean land-surface air temperature 0.28°C above the 1991–2020 average and a long-run warming trend across 1901–2025. India as a whole received 110 per cent of its long-period annual rainfall, yet East and Northeast India received only 80 per cent of its long-period southwest-monsoon rainfall, and IMD's 2025 Standardized Precipitation Index showed extremely or severely dry conditions in parts of Bihar. This is exactly why national rainfall totals cannot stand in for agrarian water conditions in Mithila, Vajji or Anga. Across the border, Madhesh Province in Nepal experienced a severe 2025 drought. ICIMOD's rapid analysis estimated rainfall deficits of roughly 30–50 per cent, widespread groundwater stress and delayed rice transplantation—about 52 per cent completed compared with about 92 per cent at the same time a year earlier—together with a potential rice shortfall. ADB subsequently identified the delayed Madhesh monsoon, along with October flood damage elsewhere, as a factor reducing paddy output and pressuring food prices. These episodes do not by themselves prove that every component was caused by anthropogenic climate change. They demonstrate the kind of compound agrarian risk that a warming climate, variable monsoon, water dependence and unequal adaptive capacity make economically consequential.