Diversified conglomerate ITC Ltd is looking to scale up interventions in the field of climate-smart agriculture to help Indian farmers withstand increasing weather-related uncertainties while boosting their incomes.

The company’s climate smart agriculture initiative has already covered 15 lakh acres of land across India benefitting over 4.5 lakh farmers. The interventions focus on reducing vulnerability while increasing the resilience of farmers towards climate change.

Inspired by the Sustainability 2.0 vision articulated by ITC Chairman Sanjiv Puri, the company is scaling up its interventions in climate-smart agriculture, and water stewardship – with a special focus on demand-side water management, and biodiversity conservation among others. The aim is to extend its CSV program to over 0.75 million hectares, biodiversity conservation to over 1 million acres and improve crop water use efficiency in agri-value chains to enable annual savings of 2,000 million kiloliters of water by 2030.

The company’s Climate Smart Village programme has demonstrated encouraging results with GHG emissions of soya and wheat reducing by up to 66 per cent, net returns increasing by up to 99 per cent as well as enhancement in yield by up to 38 per cent. As per a study of 43 villages across three states (Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra) that were part of the first phase, 70 per cent of the villages have moved into the high resilience, high yield category, thus becoming climate smart.

Climate change to impact agriculture

According to experts, Indian farmers will be deeply impacted by extreme weather events in the days to come. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that with a temperature increase between 1-4 degrees Celsius in India, rice production could decrease by 10-30 per cent and maize by 25-70 per cent. With India set to become the most populated nation globally by 2023, ensuring food security for the country’s 1.3 billion population will be also critical, ITC said in a statement.

The company has made sustainable development and climate action core pillars of its corporate strategy. Given the urgent need to build climate resilience in agriculture, ITC has embarked on a mission to make Indian villages climate smart by promoting practices that are weather smart, water smart, seed/breed smart, carbon/nutrient smart and institutional/market smart.

“The company’s flagship Climate Smart Village (CSV) initiative in partnership with the Climate Change and Food Security (CCAFS) programme of CGIAR, focuses on lowering agricultural emissions and promoting food security for the nation, whilst augmenting rural incomes. So far, the initiative has covered 2,500 villages across 11 states. CGIAR is a leading global partnership that unites international organizations engaged in research about food security,” the release said.

“Agriculture, which provides livelihoods to half of India’s population, is extremely vulnerable to the vagaries of nature and the devastating effects of climate change like frequent and extreme weather events, depleting groundwater, top soil erosion etc. Recognising these challenges, we have made identification of climate risks and building climate resilience across the value chain key components of our approach to de-risk farming and making it profitable. We are encouraged by the success of the Climate Smart Agriculture initiative and the benefits that it has yielded for farmers and accordingly plan to expand it further,” S Sivakumar, Group Head of Agri Business & Sustainability, ITC said in the statement.

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