Thursday
30
October 2025
3:00 - 4:00 PM IST
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Impact of Climate Change on Agriculture: Theory and Empirics
Research Seminar Series
Shreekant Gupta
Former Professor
Delhi School of Economics
University of Delhi
Speaker
Globally, climate change is expected to severely impact agriculture, despite adaptation (Hultgren et al., Nature 2025). This session will explore the work of Hultgren et al., described in a paper, which examines different theoretical frameworks for estimating these impacts, especially those that incorporate adaptation. It then reviews the empirical evidence both at the global level and for India, where agriculture accounts for nearly fifty per cent of employment. With respect to India, the paper presents new evidence on the impact of climate change on major crops at the district level using a rich panel dataset for 1966-2015. Our results show that climate change adversely affects both the mean and the variance of crop yields. We also find that previous estimates have underestimated the impacts on yields by not accounting for persistence.
Speaker
Shreekant Gupta
Professor Shreekant Gupta is an economist with over 30 years of policy and academic experience in environmental and urban issues, including climate change. He is a Visiting Senior Fellow, Centre for Social and Economic Progress (formerly Brookings India); a Visiting Professor, Indian School of Public Policy; and an Executive Education Senior Fellow, LKY School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. Earlier, he was Professor, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi and has also served as Director, National Institute of Urban Affairs. Professor Gupta has published several academic papers on the economics of climate change and was an author of the 5th and 6th Assessment Reports of IPCC. He is also an editor of Climatic Change (Springer). He has a PhD in Economics from the University of Maryland and was a Fulbright Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
