Assessing the vulnerability of agricultural households to covariate and idiosyncratic shocks: a case study in Odisha, India

ABSTRACT

Households in India face various covariate shocks, including cyclones, droughts and floods, and these extreme climatic shocks have a negative impact on their welfare. Although these are likely to increase in future due to climate change, households are also taking up various coping measures to deal with these extreme climatic shocks from their past experience. Hence, assessing the impact of these covariate shocks and identifying the determinants of various adaptation options have relevant policy implications in the context of designing a disaster mitigation policy. This study aims to assess farmers' vulnerability to climatic variability and climate change taking both irrigated and rain-fed regions of the country. Vulnerability analysis was done using an econometric method of ‘vulnerability as exposure to uninsured risk’ (VER) in order to test the determinants of household income loss due to covariate and idiosyncratic risk. Based on a survey of 400 farmers in Odisha, India, results show that households that access weather-related information reduce their level of vulnerability to climate change and improve their overall adaptive capacity. To address climatic vulnerability, policymakers need to emphasize farmers’ responses in different regions and can plan climate adaptation strategies based on the vulnerability assessment of entire regions.

KEY WORDS:

• Climate change
• vulnerability
• exposure
• sensitivity
• adaptive capacity
• India
• Odisha

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editor and anonymous referees for the useful and constructive comments. The author is grateful to Prof. Phanindra Goyari, School of Economics, university of Hyderabad, India for his encouragement and support during early phase of research. A special thank goes to a number of people who helped me in collecting primary data during my field survey. Mahadev, Debesh, Srinivas, M.Sanatan Rao, Aiswariya, Ashok and other lent a great helping hand during the survey time. I express my sincere thanks to all my respondents who spared some of their valuable time and provided me necessary information for my research. I would also like to thank all the officials especially Ravenue Inspector of both Cuttack and Bolangir districts, Chief manager of ADB, Bolangir, Regional manager of AICL, Bhubaneswar for their useful information in order to carry out a smooth survey. However, usual disclaimer applies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Asis Kumar Senapati is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the P.G. Department of Economics at Ravenshaw University, Cuttack, India. He obtained his Ph.D from School of Economics, University of Hyderabad. His current areas of research include Applied Econometrics, Environmental Economics, Industrial Economics, Risk management and Agriculture, and Development Economics.

Notes

1 See GFDRR: https://www.gfdrr.org/ Reducing Vulnerability to Natural Hazards for a detail analysis

2 For a detail methodological review of vulnerability assessment, see Chaudhuri et al. (2002), Ligon and Schechter (2003), Skoufias and Quisumbing (2005) and Hoddinott and Quisumbing (2003)

3 Odisha Agriculture Statistics, 2013–14.