Socioeconomic backwardness and vulnerability to climate change: evidence from Uttar Pradesh state in India

Abstract

This study tests the thesis that ‘vulnerability to climate change is not only a result of biophysical events alone but also influenced by the socioeconomic conditions in which climate change occurs’. The study chose Uttar Pradesh (UP), a state in India, for its importance in the nation's food and nutrition security programme and its high sensitivity to climate change. It uses an indicator approach to see which districts of UP are the most vulnerable to climate change, and attempts to identify the factors on a set of explanatory variables. The study finds that infrastructurally and economically developed districts are less vulnerable to climate change; in other words, vulnerability to climate change and variability is linked with social and economic development. This observation is corroborated by the findings of relational analysis wherein livestock, forestry, consumption of fertilizer, per capita income, and infant mortality rate are observed to be important correlates of vulnerability to climate change.

Keywords:

• climate change vulnerability
• socioeconomic backwardness
• indicator approach
• India
• Uttar Pradesh

Acknowledgements

This work was initiated when the author was a Junior Fellow under the Think Tank Initiative of the International Development Research Council, Canada, at the Institute of Economic Growth (IEG), New Delhi. The author is grateful to the IEG for institutional and financial support, and to its erstwhile Director Prof. Bina Agarwal for her encouragement and help in research design. The author is indebted to anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions and to Miss Divya Kumari (Research Scholar, International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai) for her help in preparing maps.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a list of studies, see Jha and Tripathi (2011); Jain and Kumar (2012).

2. Kendrapara is a highly cyclone-prone district of peninsular India.

3. Data was available – and therefore calculations made – for only 70 of UP's 83 districts.

4. Warm year is a year when average temperature exceeds the long-term (30 years) average temperature.

5. Dependency on agriculture is measured by the percentage share of value of agricultural output in net state domestic product (NSDP).

6. To deal with climate change, the NICRA has planned to organise extensive farmer participatory demonstrations of location-specific, climate resilient agricultural technologies/package of practices developed by the ICAR (Indian Council of Agricultural Research) and the SAUs (State Agriculture Universities), as well as successful ITK (Indigenous Technical Knowledge), on farmers’ fields in the most vulnerable districts of the country. For that purpose, the study identified the 100 most vulnerable districts in the country.