Climate Change and Agriculture in India: Impact and Adaptation by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319900865
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Keywords

Climate changeTropical fruitsImpact and management

11.1 Introduction

The year 2016 has been declared as warmest year in the recorded history of climate data. There is almost unanimous agreement among scientist that tropics will be first and most to bore brunt of climate change even though the magnitude of projected change as well as past climate trend is moderate as compared to other part of the words. Reason are complex comprising economic, geographic and meteorological factors including relatively narrow temperature ranges means even the small deviation is likely to have significant effect (Martin 2015). Estimated changes in terrestrial metabolic rates in the tropics are large, because of warm base line temperature (Dillon et al. 2010) even though tropical temperature change has been relatively small. Carbon cycle in the tropics has becomes more sensitive to temperature change in last 50 years and around two billion tons of more carbon per year is likely to be released from tropical forests and savannahs, in response to 1 °C rise in temperature compared with the 1960s and 1970s (Ross 2013). In addition, warming has extended the tropical region over last several decades’ (Lovett 2007) resulting newer areas are getting importance for tropical fruits.

Global warming is inevitably happening and affects many aspect of life on earth. More fluctuation in temperature, rainfall, occurrence of frequent drought, floods, storms are likely expressions of climate change. There are many projections for future climate and temperature projections which show an increase of up to 6 °C by the year 2100 while CO2 concentration might increase to 850 ppm. Temperature is known to affect both photosynthesis and respiration and their ratio must be high in order to achieve high yield (Moretti et al. 2010). Photosynthetic activity increases with temperature until certain level but further increase in temperature results inactivation of enzymes thus reduces the ability to cope with heat stress. Temperatures above 35 °C are considered to stop ripening process in climacteric fruit as it suspends ethylene production. Zhang et al. (2011) reported very high response of heat stress (43%) in terms of protein spots in a hot water treatment in peach. Higher temperatures during growing season also resulted in earlier harvest.

Developing countries account for about 98% of tropical fruit production. Tropical areas is though endowed with great diversity of tropical fruit trees, out of about 2700 species very few are commercially grown and even lesser number is traded (Paull and Duarte 2011). Presently the impact of climate change on tropical fruits has been somewhat neglected probably with assumption that these fruits are already adapted to hot and humid conditions and also due to difficulty attached in experimentation with perennial, however, there are reports of impacts, most notably on tree phenology, especially flowering and fruiting.

Fruit crops have longer period of flowering thus stay exposed to climate variability. Temperature brings about changes in hormones needed for growth and development of trees. In these fruit species temperature play important role in flower bud differentiation as well as flowering and fruit set. Symptoms like early blooming

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