Climate Variability and its Impact on Crop Production
Contents: Preface. 1. Crop responses to the Elevated CO2 : A South Asian effort/D.C. Uprety and Ranjan Das. 2. Bio-Sequestration of Carbon Dioxide through Microalgal technology/Ajitabh Bora. 3. Influence of Environmental Stress on adaptation and conservation of Medicinal Plants/ C. Rajasekharan, T. Kalaivani, C.P. Kuniyal, P. Prasad and S.K. Bhadula. 4. Impact of Climate change and other factors of honey bees/A. Rahman and P.K. Das. 6. Soil Erosion vis-à-vis Climate change/Pradip Kumar Bora. 7. Physiology and Molecular Biology of Waterlogging tolerance in crop plants/R.K. Sairam. 8. Salinity stress tolerance in crop plants/R.K. Sairam. 9. Shifting cultivation and climate change/Pankaj Barua. 10. Green house gas emission from agriculture and their mitigation strategies/Kushal Kumar Baruah……
Societies, cultures and economies in the world’s history have successfully developed by mastering their abilities to adapt to climatic conditions. However, the last decades have been characterized by a dramatic growth in human population that is imposing unprecedented pressure on natural ecosystems and on existing agricultural production systems. In addition to this pressure, societies are expected to face changes in climate at also unprecedented rate. Agricultural production systems will require effective adaptive strategies to overcome these expected pressures in the immediate future. Increasing climatic variability will result in considerable seasonal/annual fluctuations in food production. All agricultural commodities even today are sensitive to such variability. Droughts, floods, tropical cyclones, heavy precipitation events, hot extremes and heat waves are known to negatively impact agricultural production and farmer’s livelihood.
Climate change is one of the most important global environmental challenges in the history of mankind. The accelerating pace of climate change, combines with global population and income growth, threatens food security everywhere particularly in the developing countries. Assuming a global temperature rise of 4.4oC by 2080 over the cultivated areas, India’s agricultural output is projected to fall by 30-40% which would be quite alarming unless proper remedial measures are taken. Further, occurrence of new diseases, pests together with severity of the existing one is also foreseen. The impacts of climate change on Indian continent are less explored and less known till now making the future scenarios more uncertain for vulnerability assessment and risk management. This book is an effort to quantity the climate-change impacts, assess the consequences for food security and estimate the investment that would offset the negative consequences for human wellbeing.
