Sustainability & Environment (Agri-Food Systems) · Climate Science & Agriculture · also Climate Resilient Agriculture, Climate-Smart Agriculture, Disaster Risk Reduction and Management, Adaptation Planning
Reducing the harm climate does: vulnerability assessment, climate-smart agriculture, early warning, contingency plans, insurance and national adaptation planning. Index insurance as a financial product is in the Agribusiness track; here it is one adaptation tool among many.
In the exams: ICAR AICE subject 71 Unit 3 (disasters, adaptation); UPSC CSE GS-III (disaster management); UGC NET Unit 10; GATE ES Section 8
Climate adaptation is the process of adjusting to actual or expected climate and its effects, in order to moderate harm or exploit beneficial opportunities. Disaster risk reduction (DRR) is the older, overlapping field that aims to prevent new disaster risk, reduce existing risk and manage residual risk. In agriculture the two meet in climate-smart and climate-resilient farming: stress-tolerant varieties, adjusted cropping calendars, water- and soil-conserving practices, weather-based advisories, early warning, contingency plans for bad seasons, insurance and the national and local plans that coordinate them. This manual covers that toolkit, the frameworks used to assess vulnerability and resilience, the international frameworks (the Sendai Framework, National Adaptation Plans, the Paris Agreement's adaptation provisions) and the warning signs of maladaptation and limits to adaptation.
It builds on two companion subjects and does not repeat them. Climate System Science explains the hazards; Climate Change Impacts on Agriculture & Food Systems explains how heat, drought, floods, salinity and pests affect crops, livestock and fisheries, and introduces the hazard–exposure–vulnerability framing. Index insurance as a financial product is treated in depth in the Agribusiness track; here it appears as one adaptation tool among many.
Examiners approach the subject in three ways. ICAR AICE Environmental Sciences (subject 71, unit 3), UGC NET Unit 10 and GATE Environmental Science Section 8 ask for definitions (vulnerability, resilience, maladaptation), frameworks (climate-smart agriculture, the Sendai priorities and targets, NAPs) and the main practices. UPSC CSE GS-III tests disaster management institutions, early warning and drought and cyclone management with strong Indian content. Professional and research users, including GARP Sustainability and Climate Risk candidates and Certified Crop Advisers, need to judge whether an adaptation option will work, for whom, and with what trade-offs. Where practice is country-specific, this manual gives India as a worked example and says that other countries differ.
A hazard is the potential occurrence of a natural or human-induced physical event or trend that may cause loss of life, injury, damage and loss: a cyclone, a drought, a heatwave, sea-level rise. Exposure is the presence of people, livelihoods, ecosystems, infrastructure or assets in places and settings that could be adversely affected. Vulnerability, in IPCC AR6, is the propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected; it includes sensitivity or susceptibility to harm and lack of capacity to cope and adapt. Risk is the potential for adverse consequences, and AR5 and AR6 describe climate risk as arising from the interaction of hazard, exposure and vulnerability. Disaster, in the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) terminology, is a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or society due to hazardous events interacting with conditions of exposure, vulnerability and capacity. The framing has shifted over time. In AR4 vulnerability was defined as a function of exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity, so exposure sat inside vulnerability; from AR5 onwards exposure was separated out and the focus moved to risk. Both versions appear in exams, so students should state which they are using. Scholars also distinguish outcome (end-point) vulnerability, the residual impact after adaptation, typical of biophysical impact modelling, from contextual (starting-point) vulnerability, the social, economic and political conditions that make people susceptible in the first place. The second view explains why the same drought causes famine in one community and inconvenience in another; the companion subject on agricultural impacts develops the regional patterns.
For planning, risk is often expressed as probability multiplied by consequence. The annual exceedance probability of an event with return period T years is 1/T. The probability of at least one such event in n years is 1 − (1 − 1/T)ⁿ, so a '100-year flood' has about a 26 per cent chance of occurring at least once in 30 years, which surprises many decision-makers. Climate change makes these probabilities non-stationary: a return period estimated from past records can shorten as the climate warms, so design standards based only on history may understate risk. Expected annual loss sums, over a set of events, each event's annual probability times its loss; it is used to compare the benefits of protection measures. Risk matrices that rank hazards by likelihood and severity are simple screening tools but can mislead when categories are coarse. A climate risk assessment for a farm, district or company generally follows these steps: define scope and objectives; characterise hazards now and in future using observations and projections; map exposure; assess vulnerability, including differences by gender, wealth and group; estimate risk; identify and appraise adaptation options; and monitor and review. Participatory methods such as hazard mapping, seasonal calendars and problem ranking bring in local knowledge. Indicator-based vulnerability indices are useful for screening and targeting but sensitive to the choice and weighting of indicators, so rankings should be read with caution.
Resilience entered environmental science through C.S. Holling's 1973 work on ecological systems, which distinguished the speed of return to equilibrium (later called engineering resilience) from the amount of disturbance a system can absorb before shifting to a different state (ecological resilience). IPCC AR6 defines resilience broadly as the capacity of interconnected social, economic and ecological systems to cope with a hazardous event, trend or disturbance, responding or reorganising in ways that maintain their essential function, identity and structure, while also keeping the capacity for adaptation, learning and transformation. Adaptive capacity is the ability of systems, institutions, humans and other organisms to adjust to potential damage, take advantage of opportunities, or respond to consequences. It depends on assets and entitlements: income and savings, education and information, health, infrastructure, technology, social networks, institutions and governance. The sustainable livelihoods framework, widely used in rural development, groups these into five capitals: human, natural, financial, physical and social. Many resilience programmes also distinguish three capacities: absorptive (coping with a shock using existing resources, such as savings or food stocks), adaptive (making incremental adjustments, such as changing varieties) and transformative (changing the system itself, such as moving from rainfed cereals to a different livelihood). Coping is short-term and uses existing resources; adaptation is longer-term adjustment. Some coping strategies, such as selling productive assets or taking children out of school, protect consumption now but erode capacity later.
Adaptation can be classified in several ways. Anticipatory adaptation happens before impacts are observed; reactive adaptation follows them. Autonomous adaptation is undertaken by people or ecosystems without deliberate public policy, such as a farmer shifting sowing dates; planned adaptation results from deliberate policy decisions, such as a national seed policy or a canal programme. Incremental adaptation maintains the essence and integrity of a system, while transformational adaptation changes its fundamental attributes in anticipation of or response to climate change. AR6 found that most observed adaptation is fragmented, small in scale, incremental and sector-specific, and that transformational adaptation will be needed as risks rise. Adaptation options are often grouped as structural and physical (engineering, technology, ecosystem-based measures), social (education, information, behaviour) and institutional (economic instruments, laws and regulations, policies). Ecosystem-based adaptation uses biodiversity and ecosystem services, such as mangroves that buffer storm surges or watershed restoration that stabilises water supply. Nature-based solutions is a wider term covering such actions when they also deliver biodiversity and human well-being benefits. Good adaptation decisions under uncertainty favour no-regret options that pay off whatever the climate (better weather information, soil water conservation), low-regret options, options that keep flexibility, and adaptation pathways. In the adaptive pathways approach, planners identify thresholds at which a current strategy stops meeting objectives and map alternative sequences of actions, so they can switch in time without locking in. Robust decision making tests options across many plausible futures rather than optimising for one projection.
Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) was launched by FAO in 2010, at the Hague Conference on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change, as an approach that guides actions to transform and reorient agricultural systems to support food security under climate change. It has three objectives, usually called pillars: sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and incomes; adapting and building resilience to climate change; and reducing or removing greenhouse gas emissions, where possible. The qualifier 'where possible' matters: in food-insecure smallholder systems the first two pillars take priority, and mitigation is a co-benefit rather than a requirement. CSA is an approach, not a fixed list of practices. Whether a practice is climate-smart depends on context: conservation agriculture, alternate wetting and drying in rice, agroforestry, improved livestock feeding, integrated soil fertility management, stress-tolerant varieties and weather-index insurance can all be climate-smart in some places and not in others. CSA also includes enabling elements: climate information services, finance, extension, policies and institutions. The Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture (2014) and national CSA programmes promote the approach; CGIAR research developed tools such as climate-smart villages, in which farmers test portfolios of options with researchers, and CSA prioritisation frameworks that score options against the three pillars, costs and gender impacts.
The three pillars do not always align. Expanding irrigation raises productivity and resilience but may raise energy emissions and deplete groundwater. Intensifying livestock production lowers emissions per litre of milk but may raise total emissions if herd numbers grow. Agroforestry stores carbon and diversifies income but takes years to pay back and needs secure land tenure. Zero tillage saves fuel, time and water and allows timely sowing, but its soil-carbon benefit is smaller and less certain than once claimed, as the companion subjects on soil carbon and conservation agriculture explain. Critics argue that CSA is so broad that almost any practice, including large-scale industrial farming, can be labelled climate-smart, and that it can be used to market products without independent standards. Advocates of agroecology prefer an approach centred on ecological principles and farmer knowledge. In practice the most useful questions are concrete: who adopts the practice and why; what it does to yields, risk, labour (often women's labour) and emissions in that context; what it costs; and what support is needed to scale it. Adoption is limited by upfront costs, risk aversion, lack of information and extension, insecure tenure, labour constraints and slow payback. Packages that bundle varieties, information, credit and insurance tend to be adopted more widely than single technologies, because each part reduces a different barrier.
Plants cope with drought in three ways. Drought escape means completing the life cycle before the stress arrives, for example by using early-maturing varieties in regions with terminal drought. Drought avoidance means maintaining tissue water status through deeper roots or reduced water loss. Drought tolerance means continuing to function at low tissue water potential, for example through osmotic adjustment. Breeding programmes combine these with heat tolerance (pollen viability at high temperature, stay-green, cooler canopies), submergence tolerance and salt tolerance. Well-documented examples come from public breeding. Rice varieties carrying the SUB1A gene, such as Swarna-Sub1, survive about two weeks of complete submergence and were adopted widely in flood-prone eastern India and Bangladesh; marker-assisted backcrossing moved the gene into popular varieties so farmers kept the grain quality they knew. The Saltol region confers seedling-stage salt tolerance in rice. Drought-tolerant maize varieties developed by CIMMYT and IITA with national programmes for sub-Saharan Africa yield better under moderate drought without penalty in good years. Heat-tolerant and early-maturing wheat lines help in South Asia's terminal heat. Seed systems matter as much as breeding: farmers need affordable, timely access to quality seed and information about which variety suits which risk. Breeding takes time, often ten years or more from cross to release, and the target environment moves as climate changes. Breeders therefore use future-climate testing sites, managed stress screening, and genomic selection to speed up gains.
Diversification spreads risk. Crop diversification, by growing several crops or varieties with different sensitivities, reduces the chance that all fail together; intercropping cereals with legumes adds nitrogen and stabilises yields; integrated crop–livestock–tree systems spread risk across enterprises; and income diversification into off-farm work reduces dependence on a single season. The trade-off is that diversification may lower average returns compared with specialising in the most profitable crop in good years, and markets for minor crops may be thin. Shifting cropping calendars is the cheapest adaptation. Earlier sowing of wheat in the Indo-Gangetic Plains lets grain filling finish before terminal heat; zero-tillage drills help by letting farmers sow wheat directly after rice harvest without waiting for land preparation. In monsoon systems, a delayed onset can be met by switching to shorter-duration varieties or to different crops. Choosing variety duration to match the length of the reliable rainy season is central to rainfed farming. Crop calendars must be revised as observed onset, withdrawal and temperature patterns shift, using the agromet advisories and contingency plans described in later chapters. Changing the crop entirely is a more transformational step: moving from water-hungry rice to millets or pulses in drying regions, or from maize to sorghum where heat and drought increase. Such shifts depend on markets, procurement policy and diet, so crop-neutral support policies make them easier.
Water-smart practices increase the crop produced per unit of water, store water when it is plentiful, and protect supply. Rainwater harvesting collects runoff into farm ponds, tanks, check dams or soil profiles. The volume harvested from a catchment is approximately catchment area × rainfall × runoff coefficient, where the runoff coefficient depends on surface, slope and soil and ranges from under 0.1 on permeable vegetated land to above 0.8 on hard surfaces. In situ conservation keeps rain where it falls: contour bunds, ridges and furrows, tied ridges, planting pits (such as the zaï pits of the Sahel) and mulching. Irrigation efficiency describes how much of the water delivered is used by the crop. Typical field application efficiencies are of the order of 40–60 per cent for surface irrigation, 70–80 per cent for sprinklers and 85–95 per cent for drip, varying widely with design and management. Gross irrigation requirement equals net requirement divided by efficiency. Deficit irrigation applies less than full crop water demand, concentrating water on the most sensitive stages, and can raise water productivity when water rather than land is limiting. In rice, alternate wetting and drying (AWD) lets the field dry until the water table falls a set depth below the soil surface (a common guideline is 15 cm, checked with a perforated field tube) before re-flooding. It reduces irrigation water use without significant yield loss when well managed, and it substantially reduces methane emissions. Direct-seeded rice and laser land levelling also save water. A caution: higher irrigation efficiency on the farm does not necessarily save water in the basin. Water that used to return to rivers or aquifers as runoff or deep percolation was available downstream; if efficient irrigation lets farmers expand area or switch to thirstier crops, total consumption can rise. This 'irrigation efficiency paradox' means water savings need caps or allocation rules, not technology alone.
Healthy soils store more water, resist erosion and buffer crops against dry spells. Conservation agriculture, as defined by FAO, rests on three linked principles: minimum mechanical soil disturbance, permanent soil organic cover with crop residues or cover crops, and diversification of plant species through rotations and associations. Residue cover cuts evaporation and runoff, keeps soil cooler, and protects against erosion during intense rain. Cover crops and green manures add organic matter and, for legumes, nitrogen. Integrated soil fertility management combines mineral fertilisers, organic inputs and improved varieties with knowledge of local adaptation; it raises nutrient use efficiency and the return to scarce fertiliser. Agroforestry, including trees on farm boundaries and parkland systems, adds shade, windbreaks, fodder, fuel and income, and its deep roots draw water and nutrients from below the crop root zone. Farmer-managed natural regeneration in the Niger Sahel restored tree cover on millions of hectares by protecting stumps that resprout, at very low cost. Soil organic matter improves water retention, aggregate stability and nutrient supply, and so builds resilience whether or not it also counts as carbon sequestration. The companion subjects on soil carbon sequestration and conservation agriculture deal with measurement and permanence; for adaptation the relevant point is that practices that raise soil cover and organic matter reduce sensitivity to dry spells and heavy rain. Watershed development combines these water and soil measures across a landscape, from ridge to valley, with community institutions to maintain structures and share benefits. Evaluations show strong benefits where communities manage the works and upstream–downstream equity is addressed, and weaker results where structures are built without maintenance arrangements.
Weather and climate information supports farm decisions on many time scales: nowcasts and short-range forecasts (hours to three days) for spraying, irrigation and harvest; medium-range forecasts (three to ten days) for sowing and fertiliser timing; extended-range forecasts (up to about four weeks) for planning field operations; and seasonal outlooks (one to six months) for choosing crops and varieties and positioning inputs. Forecast skill falls with lead time, and seasonal forecasts are probabilistic statements, such as a 60 per cent chance of above-normal rainfall, rather than predictions of daily weather. Agrometeorological advisories translate forecasts into crop-specific advice. In India, the Gramin Krishi Mausam Sewa run by the India Meteorological Department with ICAR and state agricultural universities issues district- and block-level forecasts and advisories through agromet field units, delivered by text message, mobile apps, radio and extension staff. Other countries run similar services through national meteorological agencies, often with WMO support. Participatory integrated climate services for agriculture (PICSA), developed with farmers in Africa, combine historical climate data with participatory planning tools so that farmers can judge which options suit the climate risk they face. Value comes only when information is timely, locally relevant, understood and actionable, and when farmers trust the source. Evaluations show that advisories improve decisions on sowing, irrigation and spraying where these conditions hold. Two-way communication, feedback on forecast accuracy and attention to women farmers, who may have less access to phones and extension, improve uptake.
An effective early-warning system is 'end to end' and 'people-centred'. UNDRR and WMO describe four interrelated elements: disaster risk knowledge (knowing the hazards and vulnerabilities); detection, monitoring, analysis and forecasting of hazards; warning dissemination and communication; and preparedness and response capabilities. A forecast that never reaches the people at risk, or reaches them without a plan for what to do, does not save lives or crops. The UN Early Warnings for All initiative, launched in 2022, aims for everyone on Earth to be protected by early-warning systems by the end of 2027. For food security, early warning combines weather, crop, market and nutrition data. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) and FAO's Global Information and Early Warning System monitor rainfall, vegetation, prices and conflict. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) classifies acute food insecurity in five phases: 1 minimal, 2 stressed, 3 crisis, 4 emergency and 5 catastrophe or famine. Area-level famine classification requires thresholds for food consumption, acute malnutrition and mortality to be met together. Early warning increasingly triggers early action: anticipatory action or forecast-based financing releases pre-agreed funds when a forecast crosses a threshold, so that cash, animal feed or seed reaches households before a drought peaks or a flood arrives. Evaluations suggest that acting before the peak of a shock is cheaper and protects assets better than responding after, but triggers must be set carefully to limit false alarms and misses.
Drought monitoring uses several kinds of indicator because drought propagates from rainfall deficit to soil moisture, vegetation, streamflow and groundwater. Rainfall departure from normal is the simplest. The India Meteorological Department classifies seasonal or period rainfall as large excess (60 per cent or more above normal), excess (20 to 59 per cent above), normal (within 19 per cent above or below), deficient (20 to 59 per cent below), large deficient (60 to 99 per cent below) and no rain; other national services use their own categories. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), recommended by WMO as a standard meteorological drought index, fits a probability distribution to long-term precipitation for a chosen accumulation period and transforms it to a standard normal value. In the widely used McKee classification, SPI from −1.0 to −1.49 is moderately dry, −1.5 to −1.99 severely dry and −2.0 or less extremely dry. Short accumulation periods (1–3 months) reflect soil moisture and agricultural drought; longer ones (6–24 months) reflect streamflow, reservoirs and groundwater. The SPEI adds evapotranspiration and so captures warming. Satellite vegetation indices show crop and pasture condition. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) = (NIR − Red)/(NIR + Red). The Vegetation Condition Index (VCI) scales the current NDVI between the historical minimum and maximum for the same period: VCI = 100 × (NDVI − NDVImin)/(NDVImax − NDVImin); values below about 35–40 are commonly read as drought stress, though thresholds vary by programme. Soil moisture from models and satellites, reservoir levels and groundwater observations complete the picture. India's Manual for Drought Management combines rainfall, vegetation, soil moisture, crop sown area and hydrological indicators to support drought declaration, with field verification.
Historically, drought was handled as a crisis: relief arrived after crops failed and livestock died. The Integrated Drought Management Programme of WMO and the Global Water Partnership, and the 2013 High-level Meeting on National Drought Policy, promote a shift to risk management built on three pillars: monitoring and early warning; vulnerability and impact assessment; and mitigation, preparedness and response. Drought mitigation in agriculture includes the water- and soil-smart practices of Chapter 5, drought-tolerant and early varieties, fodder banks and feed reserves for livestock, water-use planning that keeps reserves in reservoirs and aquifers, crop insurance, and social protection that can scale up in bad years. In pastoral areas, commercial destocking, in which herders sell animals early while prices are still reasonable, and protection of mobility and access to dry-season grazing reduce losses compared with waiting until animals die. Employment guarantee and public works programmes provide income and can build water-harvesting assets at the same time. Drought declaration matters because it unlocks relief and insurance payments; delays or political pressure distort it. Clear, objective triggers combining several indicators, published in advance, make declarations faster and fairer. After a drought, a review of what worked and what did not feeds into the next drought plan, closing the risk-management cycle.
Floods and tropical cyclones damage crops by submergence, wind, salinity from storm surge and sediment deposition, and they kill livestock and destroy stored grain, seed, equipment and infrastructure. Preparedness reduces these losses. Before the season, farmers and agencies can choose flood-tolerant varieties such as Sub1 rice, adjust sowing so that the most vulnerable stage avoids the peak flood period, raise seedbeds and community nurseries on higher ground so that seedlings are available for replanting, store seed in safe places, plan livestock refuges and fodder stocks on raised ground, and check drainage channels and embankments. When a cyclone or flood warning is issued, actions include harvesting mature crops early, moving stored grain, seed and inputs to safe places, evacuating livestock or releasing them from tethers, securing equipment and boats, and avoiding fertiliser or pesticide application that would be washed away. Coastal communities protected by mangrove and tree shelterbelts suffer less wind and surge damage, although such belts reduce rather than eliminate risk. The value of preparedness is visible in falling cyclone death tolls in Bangladesh and the Indian state of Odisha. Both invested in cyclone shelters, better forecasts, community volunteers who spread warnings and help evacuate people, and drills. Large evacuations ahead of major cyclones in Odisha in the 2010s kept loss of life far below earlier disasters of similar strength. Agricultural and livelihood losses, however, remain large, which is why preparedness must extend from saving lives to protecting livelihoods.
After floods and cyclones, rapid recovery reduces the long-term damage to livelihoods. Priorities include assessing damage quickly, often with satellite flood maps and field surveys; supplying seed of suitable short-duration varieties for replanting or for a following crop; repairing irrigation and drainage; removing sand casting or saline deposits from fields where possible; providing animal health care and fodder; and making insurance and relief payments promptly. Fields affected by seawater may need leaching with fresh water and salt-tolerant varieties for one or more seasons, as the companion subject on salinity describes. 'Build back better', one of the Sendai Framework priorities, means using recovery to reduce future risk: raising plinths of houses and grain stores, relocating infrastructure out of the most hazardous zones, upgrading embankments and drainage with attention to sediment and waterlogging trade-offs, and restoring mangroves and floodplain wetlands that absorb floods. Land-use planning that keeps new settlement and high-value infrastructure out of floodplains prevents risk from growing. Structural flood protection carries a known trap. Embankments and levees reduce frequent floods but encourage development behind them, so that when a rare flood overtops or breaches them the losses are larger than before. This 'levee effect' or safe-development paradox is a form of maladaptation if not managed by land-use controls and residual-risk planning. Floodplain farming systems in parts of South and Southeast Asia traditionally worked with floods, using deepwater rice, floating gardens and fish culture; modern adaptation can draw on these 'room for the river' ideas.
A contingency plan sets out in advance what farmers and agencies should do when a season goes wrong, so that responses are fast and appropriate rather than improvised. In India, ICAR's Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture (CRIDA), with state agricultural universities and state departments, prepared district agricultural contingency plans for most of the country's districts. Each plan describes the district's agro-ecology, soils, cropping systems and rainfall pattern, and then lists responses for weather aberrations: delayed onset of the monsoon by two, four, six or eight weeks; early-season drought after sowing; mid-season drought at the vegetative or flowering stage; terminal drought; excess rain or floods; heat and cold waves; and pest and disease outbreaks. It also covers livestock, poultry and fisheries. Typical responses for a delayed monsoon are to keep the main crop if the delay is short, to switch to shorter-duration varieties of the same crop as delay lengthens, and finally to change crop altogether, for example from long-duration rice or cotton to pulses, millets or oilseeds that fit the shortened season. For early-season drought, measures include gap filling or resowing, interculture to create a soil mulch, and thinning. For mid-season drought, they include life-saving irrigation from farm ponds, mulching, foliar sprays of nutrients and weed control to reduce competition. For terminal drought, they include harvesting at physiological maturity and planning a residual-moisture crop where possible. For excess rain, they include drainage, replanting and nutrient top-dressing.
A plan on paper is not enough. Real-time contingency planning means that agencies act on the plan as the season unfolds: monitoring rainfall and crop conditions, triggering seed supply of alternative crops before they are needed, and issuing advisories through the agromet system. The most common bottleneck is seed: switching to short-duration varieties or alternative crops requires seed reserves of the right varieties in the right place at the right time, which in turn requires seed banks at district or village level and coordination with seed producers. Contingency plans also need updating, because climate trends shift onset dates, dry-spell frequency and heat extremes, and because markets, irrigation and varieties change. Involving farmers and extension staff in preparing and testing plans makes them more realistic. Plans should take account of different farm types, such as rainfed smallholders, irrigated farms and tenant farmers, whose options differ. Similar seasonal planning exists elsewhere under other names: drought preparedness plans in southern Africa, early action protocols for humanitarian agencies, and farm-level drought plans in Australia. The common logic is the same: identify likely shocks, decide in advance on actions and triggers, pre-position resources, and review after each season.
Insurance transfers part of the financial risk of a bad season to an insurer in return for a premium, so that a farmer can recover without selling assets or falling into debt. It does not prevent the physical loss, which is why it complements rather than replaces risk reduction. In the language of disaster risk management, insurance belongs to risk transfer, alongside risk retention (savings, reserves, contingent credit). Indemnity-based crop insurance pays for the actual loss on the insured farm, assessed by field inspection. It matches payment to loss but is costly to administer for many small farms, and it suffers from moral hazard (insured farmers may take less care) and adverse selection (riskier farmers are more likely to buy). Index insurance pays when an index correlated with losses crosses a threshold: rainfall or temperature at a weather station (weather index insurance), average yield in an area measured by crop-cutting experiments (area-yield index), or satellite vegetation or soil-moisture measures. Index products are cheaper to run, pay quickly and avoid moral hazard and much adverse selection, but they carry basis risk: the farmer's loss and the index payout may not match, so a farmer can suffer a loss and receive nothing, or receive a payment without loss. Basis risk is the main reason demand for index insurance has often been low. A simple weather-index payout is linear between a trigger and an exit level: payout = sum insured × (trigger − index)/(trigger − exit) when the index falls between them, nothing above the trigger, and the full sum insured at or below the exit. The actuarially fair premium equals the expected payout; real premiums include loading for administration, capital and profit, and many governments subsidise them.
Public crop insurance schemes exist in many countries, often heavily subsidised. India's Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana, launched in 2016, uses mainly an area-yield approach with crop-cutting experiments supported by technology, and caps farmers' premiums at 2 per cent of the sum insured for kharif food and oilseed crops, 1.5 per cent for rabi food and oilseed crops and 5 per cent for annual commercial and horticultural crops, with central and state governments paying the rest. It also covers prevented sowing, post-harvest losses and localised calamities assessed individually. Other well-known programmes include index-based livestock insurance in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia, which uses satellite vegetation data to estimate forage scarcity, and sovereign risk pools such as the African Risk Capacity, which pay governments rapidly so they can fund drought response. As adaptation, insurance has both strengths and risks. It can unlock credit and investment, because lenders are more willing to lend to insured farmers and farmers dare to adopt higher-return practices. Payouts after a disaster protect assets and children's nutrition. But if premiums are subsidised without regard to risk, insurance can encourage farming in increasingly unsuitable places or of unsuitable crops, a form of maladaptation; and if climate change raises the frequency of losses, premiums rise or schemes become unaffordable. Insurance works best as one layer in a risk-layering approach: farmers retain small, frequent losses through savings and good practices, insurance covers medium losses, and governments and international mechanisms cover catastrophic losses.
The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 was adopted at the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai, Japan, in March 2015, and endorsed by the UN General Assembly. It succeeded the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015. Its expected outcome is the substantial reduction of disaster risk and losses in lives, livelihoods and health and in the economic, physical, social, cultural and environmental assets of persons, businesses, communities and countries. It moved the emphasis from managing disasters to managing risk, and from response to prevention. It has four priorities for action: (1) understanding disaster risk; (2) strengthening disaster risk governance to manage disaster risk; (3) investing in disaster risk reduction for resilience; and (4) enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response and to 'Build Back Better' in recovery, rehabilitation and reconstruction. It sets seven global targets: (a) substantially reduce global disaster mortality by 2030; (b) substantially reduce the number of affected people; (c) reduce direct disaster economic loss in relation to global gross domestic product; (d) substantially reduce disaster damage to critical infrastructure and disruption of basic services; (e) substantially increase the number of countries with national and local disaster risk reduction strategies by 2020; (f) substantially enhance international cooperation to developing countries; and (g) substantially increase the availability of and access to multi-hazard early warning systems and disaster risk information and assessments. Progress is reported through the Sendai Framework Monitor, managed by UNDRR, with indicators shared with the Sustainable Development Goals.
The Sendai Framework covers small- and large-scale, frequent and infrequent, sudden and slow-onset disasters caused by natural or human-made hazards and related environmental, technological and biological hazards, so it includes drought, epidemics and climate-related slow-onset events. It stresses that states have the primary responsibility for reducing disaster risk but must share it with local governments, the private sector and other stakeholders, and it calls for an all-of-society approach, inclusive of women, persons with disabilities, older persons, Indigenous peoples and local communities. Agriculture appears in Sendai through the protection of livelihoods and productive assets, including livestock, working animals, tools and seeds, and through the call for resilient food systems. FAO supports countries in integrating agriculture into national DRR strategies and in collecting data on agricultural damage and loss, which is part of target (c). National implementation varies. In India, the Disaster Management Act 2005 created the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), chaired by the Prime Minister, state and district authorities, and the National Disaster Response Force; the National Disaster Management Plan, first released in 2016, was aligned with the Sendai Framework. Drought, unusually, is handled in India mainly by the agriculture ministry rather than the home ministry. Sendai is one of three linked agreements of 2015, alongside the Paris Agreement on climate change and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Climate adaptation and DRR share goals, tools and often institutions, and coherence between national adaptation plans and DRR strategies avoids duplication and gaps.
Under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, adaptation planning developed in stages. National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs) were established in 2001 at COP7 in Marrakesh for least developed countries, to identify urgent and immediate adaptation needs. The National Adaptation Plan (NAP) process was established in 2010 under the Cancún Adaptation Framework at COP16, to help countries identify medium- and long-term adaptation needs and integrate adaptation into development planning; it is open to all developing countries. NAPs are country-driven, iterative and meant to be gender-responsive and participatory. The Paris Agreement (2015) established a global goal on adaptation in Article 7, of enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change, and asks parties to engage in adaptation planning and to submit adaptation communications. At COP28 in 2023 parties adopted the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience to guide progress towards the global goal, with targets on water, food and agriculture, health, ecosystems, infrastructure, poverty and livelihoods, and cultural heritage. Article 8 addresses loss and damage, and a fund for responding to loss and damage was agreed at COP27 and operationalised at COP28. Finance flows through several channels: the Adaptation Fund (created under the Kyoto Protocol and originally financed by a share of proceeds from Clean Development Mechanism credits), the Least Developed Countries Fund and Special Climate Change Fund managed by the Global Environment Facility, the Green Climate Fund, multilateral development banks and bilateral donors. AR6 and UNEP's Adaptation Gap Reports find that adaptation finance falls far short of estimated needs in developing countries.
Countries implement adaptation through national climate strategies, sector plans and local programmes. India's National Action Plan on Climate Change (2008) set up eight national missions, including the National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture, the National Water Mission and the National Mission for a Green India, and states prepared State Action Plans on Climate Change. ICAR's National Innovations in Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA), launched in 2011, combines research on resilient varieties and practices with technology demonstration in vulnerable districts and the contingency plans described earlier. Other countries' NAPs similarly name agriculture and water as priority sectors. Community-based adaptation (CBA) starts from the priorities, knowledge and capacities of communities, rather than from outside experts. It uses participatory vulnerability assessment, community action plans and local institutions to choose and manage options such as water harvesting, seed banks or diversified livelihoods. Locally led adaptation goes further, calling for decision-making power and finance to be devolved to the lowest appropriate level; a set of eight principles for locally led adaptation, endorsed by many governments and agencies from 2021, includes devolving decisions, addressing structural inequalities, providing patient and predictable funding, investing in local capabilities, building understanding of climate risk, flexible programming, transparency and accountability, and collaborative action. Indigenous and local knowledge, such as traditional forecasting indicators, landraces and water management systems, is recognised by AR6 as a valuable source of adaptation options, best combined with scientific knowledge rather than replaced by it. Community approaches face challenges of scale, elite capture and the limits of what communities can do without wider policy change, such as secure land rights and market access.
AR6 defines maladaptation as actions that may lead to increased risk of adverse climate-related outcomes, including via increased greenhouse gas emissions, increased or shifted vulnerability to climate change, more inequitable outcomes, or diminished welfare, now or in the future. Most often it is an unintended consequence. AR6 found with high confidence that there is increased evidence of maladaptation across many sectors and regions since AR5, and that maladaptive responses can create lock-ins of vulnerability, exposure and risk that are difficult and expensive to change. Agricultural examples are common. Subsidised electricity for groundwater pumping relieves drought today but depletes aquifers and makes future droughts worse; in parts of north-western India groundwater has fallen steeply under intensive rice–wheat irrigation. Embankments that encourage settlement behind them create the levee effect. Shifting to cash crops that raise income in good years but increase exposure to price and weather shocks can raise vulnerability for some households. Air-conditioning and energy-intensive desalination reduce heat and water risk but raise emissions. Insurance subsidies that ignore rising risk keep farmers in unsuitable locations. Projects that benefit better-off farmers can shift vulnerability onto landless labourers, women or downstream users. Avoiding maladaptation means looking at long time horizons, wider spatial scales and distributional effects; considering multiple climate futures; involving those affected; and monitoring outcomes so that course corrections can be made. Flexible, reversible and incremental options that keep future choices open reduce the risk of lock-in.
Adaptation cannot avoid all losses. AR6 defines an adaptation limit as the point at which an actor's objectives, or system needs, cannot be secured from intolerable risks through adaptive actions. Soft limits exist where options may exist but are currently not available to an actor because of financial, institutional, social or technological constraints; hard limits exist where no adaptive actions are possible to avoid intolerable risks. AR6 found that soft limits are already being experienced, particularly by small-scale farmers and households along some low-lying coasts, and that some natural ecosystems, such as some warm-water coral reefs, coastal wetlands, rainforests and polar and mountain ecosystems, have reached or surpassed hard limits. With increasing warming, more systems will reach limits, and losses and damages will increase. Examples in agriculture include heat that exceeds the tolerance of crops at flowering in places where no tolerant variety or shift in calendar is available, salinisation that makes rice farming impossible in parts of a delta, and heat and humidity that make outdoor work dangerous for much of the day. When limits are reached, the remaining options are transformational: changing crops or livelihoods, moving production elsewhere, or planned relocation of people, each with large social costs. Residual losses and damages beyond adaptation limits are the subject of the loss and damage agenda under the UNFCCC. Some losses are economic and can be compensated; others, such as loss of culture, place, identity or ecosystems, are non-economic and irreversible. AR6 stresses that limiting warming to 1.5 °C keeps more adaptation options open and reduces the number of systems reaching their limits, which is the strongest link between mitigation and adaptation.
A student uses this subject to learn precise definitions that examiners test against each other (hazard, exposure, vulnerability, risk, resilience, adaptive capacity, maladaptation, soft and hard limits), the Sendai priorities and seven targets, the CSA pillars, the four elements of early warning and the evolution from NAPAs to NAPs and the Paris global goal. The numerical core is small but recurrent: return-period probabilities, water-harvesting volumes, gross irrigation requirement, SPI and VCI classes, and index-insurance payouts. Indian candidates must add institutions and schemes such as NDMA, NICRA, contingency plans, the agromet advisory service and PMFBY.
A five-year practitioner, such as a district agriculture officer, an agromet unit scientist, an NGO resilience programme manager or an insurance analyst, uses the subject to update district contingency plans and pre-position seed, issue advisories that farmers act on, design or evaluate water-harvesting and soil conservation works, set triggers for anticipatory action or index insurance and explain basis risk, and run participatory vulnerability assessments that capture differences by gender and wealth. The typical judgement is whether an option will work for the poorest farmers, not just the average one.
A senior professional with 25 years' experience, such as a state relief commissioner, a ministry adaptation lead, a development-bank programme director or an insurer's agriculture head, uses the subject to allocate budgets across risk reduction, preparedness, risk transfer and response; to align national adaptation plans with DRR strategies and sector programmes; to spot maladaptation in subsidies, embankments and groundwater policy; and to decide when incremental measures are no longer enough and transformational change, such as crop shifts or planned relocation, must be prepared. Such a person also negotiates adaptation and loss-and-damage finance.
A researcher with a PhD and 25 years' experience works on the evidence base: rigorous evaluation of adaptation outcomes, including whether climate-smart practices raise yields and resilience for whom; methods for measuring resilience and adaptation progress for the Paris global goal; the design of forecast-based triggers; basis risk reduction with satellite data; and the empirical study of adaptation limits and maladaptation. Such a researcher contributes to IPCC and national assessments and builds interdisciplinary teams across agronomy, climate science, economics and social science.
This manual uses India as the worked example for institutions and schemes; other countries' disaster laws, insurance schemes, drought declaration rules and advisory services differ and are not described in detail. Scheme parameters such as PMFBY premium caps change with policy revisions and should be checked against the current operational guidelines. It gives no numerical estimates of water or methane savings from alternate wetting and drying, no benefit–cost ratios for early warning or preparedness, and no adaptation-finance figures, because published values vary widely by site, method and year. Index insurance product design, pricing and reinsurance are treated in depth in the Agribusiness track. Urban, health and infrastructure adaptation are mentioned only where they touch agriculture, and the economics of adaptation (cost–benefit and real-options analysis) is covered only conceptually.
Original practice questions written to the syllabus and pattern of the exams named in each question's examTags. They are not past papers and do not reproduce any board's questions.
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