ESSAYS ON ADAPTATION RESPONSES TO CLIMATE VARIABILITY IN INDIA
Open Access
- Author:
- Zaveri, Esha
- Graduate Program:
- Agricultural, Environmental and Regional Economics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 01, 2016
- Committee Members:
- Karen Ann Fisher-Vanden, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Karen Ann Fisher-Vanden, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
David Gerard Abler, Committee Member
Douglas Harvey Wrenn II, Committee Member
Jenni Evans, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Groundwater
Indian Monsoon
Climate Change
Migration
Irrigation
Adaptation
Inter-basin transfers - Abstract:
- Studying interactions between human and natural systems presents a unique opportunity for multidisciplinary and policy-relevant research. This dissertation consists of three chapters that examine how changes in water access, availability and use influence agricultural adaptation, and labor mobility in rural India. Since an increasingly variable future climate will amplify stresses on the water cycle, with large and uneven consequences, the findings from these chapters have important implications for both environmental and developmental policies that seek to promote long-run sustainability. The first chapter assesses the challenges of groundwater depletion, surface water stress, and food security that India is likely to face with future climate change. Different from previous literature in this area, it explicitly accounts for both water demand and supply by combining an econometric model of irrigation decision-making with a process based hydrology model. The results highlight significant spatial and regional heterogeneity in future changes in groundwater demand and supply. A complete loss of non-renewable groundwater irrigation could reduce annual crop production by as much as 25 percent, directly affecting the caloric intake of more than 170 million people. Results also indicate that India’s large proposed river linking scheme is unlikely to alleviate groundwater stress nationally without substantial investments in reservoir storage capacity. The second chapter examines how the introduction of high yield variety of seeds in the mid-1960s (Green Revolution) and the resulting path dependency of groundwater development underlies the results we see in chapter one. The results suggest that increasing access to more reliable, yet largely unsustainable sources of groundwater, have equipped farmers with the ability to withstand monsoonal fluctuations in the irrigation-intensive dry season. The results also indicate that initial groundwater endowments have influenced the types of irrigation infrastructure and capacities that have developed in India as a result of the Green Revolution, with lasting effects on the adaptability of agriculture to weather shocks. The third chapter investigates how irrigation water access, availability and use also have wider spillover effects on the agrarian labor economy. Results show that migration decisions respond to agricultural opportunity costs associated with irrigation and that access to assured irrigation from deep tubewells determines the relative benefits of migration. Further, higher electricity provision that facilitates groundwater extraction from greater depths increases the agricultural opportunity cost of rural households and reduces the short-term migration of its members. From a policy perceptive, shutting down access to groundwater will have significant effects on temporary labor mobility.