Benefits of irrigation against heat stress in agriculture: Evidence from wheat crop in India
Pratap Birthal,
Jaweriah Hazrana,
Digvijay Negi () and
Ghanshyam Pandey
Agricultural Water Management, 2021, vol. 255, issue C
Abstract:
Applying the fixed effects regression technique to the highly spatially disaggregated district-level data from 1966–67 to 2011–12 this paper has assessed the impact of heat stress on wheat production in India and concurrently evaluated the role of irrigation towards offsetting its harmful impact. It has brought out three key highlights. One, heat stress negatively impacts crop yield, and the impact has increased over time. Two, irrigation, besides its contribution towards improving crop yield, also moderates the harmful impact of heat stress, but over time its effectiveness has declined. Three, the measure of heat stress built on multiple aspects of excess temperature (i.e., intensity, persistence, and frequency) explains variation in crop yield better than does a single aspect of it. Given the increasing scarcity of irrigation water and rising temperature, these findings suggest the need for exploring technological and policy options for improving irrigation water-use efficiency and breeding of crops for heat tolerance and low water footprints.
Keywords: Heat-stress; Yield loss; Adaptation; Irrigation; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378377421002158
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:255:y:2021:i:c:s0378377421002158
DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2021.106950
Access Statistics for this article
Agricultural Water Management is currently edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns
More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().