Author: Gopal Krishna
Climate change and water availability directly impact agricultural practices around the globe. Humans are dependent on agriculture for their food needs. Changing climatic conditions like the delayed onset of monsoon, less rainfall, and increasing temperature are profoundly impacting agriculture practices. Therefore, this has a direct or indirect impact on human health. According to FAO, only 12% of global land is available for crop production and that too is not increasing proportionately with the continuously increasing world population. Climatic stresses may cause insufficiency to food security. Hence, this type of study is quite significant for decision-making. In the Indian scenario, approximately 61% of the total
net sown area is rainfed. In this huge proportion of rainfed areas, there are many types of changing climatic conditions that impact crop productivity. Geoinformation science-based big data encompasses enormous opportunities for addressing issues like climate modeling, its impact on crops, and production alteration. This chapter discusses the real-world problems, their impacts as well as the way forward for sustainable solutions by utilizing the strength of remote sensing big data. Here, time series analysis, machine learning-based predictive multivariate modeling approaches have been exploited to detect the climatic impact on crop production for rice and cotton crops of the highest productive districts of Maharashtra state. After delineation of climatic implications on agriculture, its consequences on human health issues have been discussed. The ML-driven partial least squares regression (PLSR) technique was proved better over other investigated techniques. The results of this study illustrate that with the rise in temperature and rainfall during 2050, cotton production is projected to decline by 1–35%, whereas rice production looks to be increased by 0.4–20% by nullifying high temperature with excess rainfall except for one district.
Its Impact on Human Health
As the projected weather scenario reflects that by 2050, there would be a 1.5–2.0 °C increase in temperature and uncertainty in the precipitation, loss to crop yield would be anticipated. The world’s ever-increasing population needs food to survive, and hence, food security needs to be maintained. As per the scenario presented in this paper as well as in other studies, crop production would tend to be decline with the projected weather conditions, more variability in rainfalls, and growing temperatures. This will reduce crop production in tropical developing regions like India and may pose a threat to food security. In case of less availability of food, malnutrition would take place. Particularly for Maharashtra state, malnutrition is already a challenge, and in the case of food insecurity, the malnutrition problem would get worse. Loss of crop production will directly impact the population living in the districts, both monetarily and materially. Hence, it would directly affect the health of the humans in the study areas. Therefore, necessary actions are needed to be taken on time to combat such frightening situations.
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CGIAR and ICARDA have also published this research on their portals and social media handles. See below post at CGIAR portal-
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