Climate change adaptation in India: a systematic review of adaptation strategies, factors, impacts, barriers, and future research directions
- 1School of Agricultural Innovations and Advanced Learning, Vellore Institute of Technology
Abstract
Climate change significantly impacts the Indian agriculture by affecting the productivity of crops, farm income and livelihood of the farmers. Farmers in response have implemented diverse adaptation strategies but the evidence on these responses is still unevenly distributed across regions and disciplines. This paper is a systematic review of the climate change adaptation strategies used by the farmers in India, factors affecting the adoption, the impact of strategies as well as the major barriers faced by farmer. Using the PRISMA guidelines, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar were searched to gain access to peer reviewed articles published between 2014 and 2025 and 113 empirical studies were selected after the screening and quality check. The most popular adaptation strategies are crop diversification, altered planting schedules, crop rotation and use of stress tolerant variety being the most popular since they are cost effective and locally suitable. The demographic, institutional, and economic factors, especially education, access to extension services, availability of credit, farm size and level of income, influence the adoption decisions. In most of the studies, the adaptation strategies are linked to the following favourable outcomes: better crop yield, income, better livelihood security and increased resilience to climatic shocks. However, the large-scale adoptions are limited by existing barrier including the lack of institutional support, insufficient access to timely availability of climate information and so on. The review also recognizes critical research gaps such as the absence of longitudinal research, issue of maladaptation and inadequate combination of behavioural and institutional aspects.
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BibTeX
@article{nivetha2026climate,
title = {{Climate change adaptation in India: a systematic review of adaptation strategies, factors, impacts, barriers, and future research directions}},
author = {S Nivetha and Kanagaraj Mohanraj},
journal = {Frontiers in Climate},
year = {2026},
month = may,
doi = {10.3389/fclim.2026.1792955},
url = {https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2026.1792955},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Climate change adaptation in India: a systematic review of adaptation strategies, factors, impacts, barriers, and future research directions
AU - S Nivetha
AU - Kanagaraj Mohanraj
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/05/26
JO - Frontiers in Climate
DO - 10.3389/fclim.2026.1792955
UR - https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2026.1792955
AB - Climate change significantly impacts the Indian agriculture by affecting the productivity of crops, farm income and livelihood of the farmers. Farmers in response have implemented diverse adaptation strategies but the evidence on these responses is still unevenly distributed across regions and disciplines. This paper is a systematic review of the climate change adaptation strategies used by the farmers in India, factors affecting the adoption, the impact of strategies as well as the major barriers faced by farmer. Using the PRISMA guidelines, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar were searched to gain access to peer reviewed articles published between 2014 and 2025 and 113 empirical studies were selected after the screening and quality check. The most popular adaptation strategies are crop diversification, altered planting schedules, crop rotation and use of stress tolerant variety being the most popular since they are cost effective and locally suitable. The demographic, institutional, and economic factors, especially education, access to extension services, availability of credit, farm size and level of income, influence the adoption decisions. In most of the studies, the adaptation strategies are linked to the following favourable outcomes: better crop yield, income, better livelihood security and increased resilience to climatic shocks. However, the large-scale adoptions are limited by existing barrier including the lack of institutional support, insufficient access to timely availability of climate information and so on. The review also recognizes critical research gaps such as the absence of longitudinal research, issue of maladaptation and inadequate combination of behavioural and institutional aspects.
SN - 2624-9553
ER -