Climate Change and Agricultural Productivity in Uttar Pradesh: the Mediating Role of Farmers’ Adaptation Strategies
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Abstract
Farms in Uttar Pradesh now contend with hotter seasons, an unreliable monsoon, drought in Bundelkhand and floods on the eastern plains. This study asks how four climatic stressors (rising temperature, rainfall variability, drought exposure and flood exposure) affect agricultural productivity, both directly and through the adaptation strategies farmers adopt. Data came from a structured questionnaire administered to 384 farm households, selected by multistage sampling in Jhansi, Banda, Gorakhpur and Bahraich districts, and were analysed with partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). Every reliability and validity criterion was met: the Fornell-Larcker criterion held, and the highest heterotrait-monotrait (HTMT) ratio was 0.530. All four stressors lowered productivity directly (β = −0.171 to −0.254) while also prompting adaptation (β = 0.169 to 0.307). Adaptation raised productivity (β = 0.459, p < .001) and carried a significant positive indirect effect from each stressor, which amounts to competitive partial mediation. The model explained 31.7% of the variance in adaptation and 23.2% in productivity, and PLSpredict showed high out-of-sample predictive power. Farmers’ own adjustments recover part of the yield lost to climatic stress, but not all of it
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