Retrospective climate resilience assessment of semi-arid farming systems in India

ABSTRACT

Semi-arid farming systems in India are facing an increasing frequency of climate change-induced extreme weather events. With the aim of improving their climate resilience, we retrospectively assess climate resilience in two case studies in Maharashtra, India. We considered a 15-year period and multiple interventions in both. The systems showed improved climate resilience when agricultural productivity-enhancing interventions were combined with those related to water management, soil health, livelihood diversification, and food and nutrition security. Further, we recommend embedding a monitoring, evaluation and learning component within the design of all interventions to help with adaptive decision-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• resilience
• semi-arid
• water management
• agriculture
• India

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the people of Babai and Deulgaon Tad for their consent and involvement in the study. The authors are also grateful to the staff at the Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR), India, for collaborating with this research and assisting in the case study. We acknowledge the support and feedback during the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) Virtual Conference on 'Water Resource Management for Achieving Food Security in Asia Under Climate Change' held on 26-27 October 2022. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and for their many insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

CRediT author statement

A.S.: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, formal analysis, writing – original draft, reviewing and editing. S.E.W.: supervision, conceptualization. D.Da.: investigation and data curation. M.D’S.: supervision. F.Lu.: supervision. M.P.M.M.: supervision, methodology, writing – review and editing.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2023.2207680