Assessment of Vulnerability and Impact of Climate Change on Crop Production in Krishna river basin of Andhra Pradesh

Climate change is essentially a long term phenomenon and is supposed to be gradual in its impact for most part. Integrated assessment combining insights of many disciplines is used as a primary tool in order to follow the causal chain of events from perturbations in the environment to the final outcomes. This can be done by first assessing the vulnerability of different regions to climatic change and then quantifying its impact on agriculture using the long term data. The present paper applies a statistical methodology to rank the districts of Krishna river basin in terms of vulnerability and to classify them into different levels of vulnerability by constructing composite vulnerability indices. Also the paper presents the impacts of climatic change on productivity and area under three major crops of Andhra Pradesh by employing Ricardian model. Existing base level area and yields are obtained by substituting average values of the explanatory variables for each district in the area and yield regressions