An Economic Analysis of Climate Change Trend and Its Impact in Sivagangai District of Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

The present study was taken up in Sivagangai district to examine the issues of trend in climate change, association between climate change and area, production and productivity of crops and impact of climate change on production of crops. The climate trend in Sivagangai district was studied using the descriptive statistics of skewness, kurtosis, coefficient of variation and compound growth rate of climatic variables of maximum temperature, minimum temperature and rainfall over the past 50 years from 1971 to 2020. Pearson correlation technique was used to analyze the degree of association between climatic variables and area, production and productivity of principal crops namely paddy, black gram and groundnut. Cobb-Douglas production function model was fitted to study the quantitative relationship between the average production of principal crops grown in the district and the climatic variables of temperature and rainfall and cropped area. Maximum temperature and minimum temperature were negatively skewed and rainfall was positively skewed. Kurtosis for maximum temperature was platykurtic and for the minimum temperature and rainfall of Sivagangai district, the kurtosis was Leptokurtic. The maximum temperature and minimum temperature were less variable and rainfall was highly variable. Pearson correlation coefficient revealed that maximum temperature, minimum temperature and rainfall had significant association with area, production and productivity of crops in Sivagangai district of Tamil Nadu. Cobb- Douglas production function analysis revealed that annual rainfall had a positive relationship with production of paddy. On the other hand, climatic variables of temperature and rainfall were not influencing the groundnut and black gram production.