Agriculture is a cornerstone of India's economy, employing between 40% and 50% of the country's workforce, while providing food for over a billion people. But it's increasingly under threat from extreme weather events linked to climate change. Between 2015 and 2021, India lost 83.8 million acres (33.9 million hectares) to floods and excess rain, and 86.5 million acres (35 million hectares) to drought.
India's farmers are mainly smallholders — but these small farms, fragmented across the country, are heterogeneous and have limited data. This makes it hard to devise policies that can account for how they are being impacted by extreme weather events.
