Together with Marcatus, we are investigating how extreme heat is changing smallholder farming in India, and identifying adaptation strategies that strengthen the livelihoods of community members, often women, on the front lines of climate change.

Global warming is magnified in the tropics, leaving smallholder farmers increasingly exposed to extreme heat. This is especially true for the cultivation of labor-intensive horticultural crops, which leave workers vulnerable to heat stress. Since 2023, FOS Co-Director Raji Jayaraman has been working alongside Marcatus to understand how smallholder productivity is impacted by same-day heat, and what types of short-run adaptation strategies can be deployed to cope with it.

For farmers, heat stress poses an existential threat to livelihoods that depend on physically demanding, outdoor work. For agribusinesses like Marcatus QED, understanding and responding to heat risk is essential for sustainable supply chains. This partnership addresses a critical evidence gap: while climate impacts on agriculture are well documented at seasonal scales, little is known about how extreme heat affects productivity and earnings on a day-to-day basis. Marcatus’ deep, hands-on domain expertise and strong commitment to evidence-based decision-making, combined with uniquely granular contract-farming data, make it possible to study these questions within real production systems and rapidly translate findings into practice.

“The most extreme consequences of climate change are borne by those who are least responsible for it and most vulnerable to it. Heat is a daily reality for smallholder farmers. Farm workers labour all day in the hot sun with limited scope for adaptation, at least in the short run. What drew me to his project was the tragedy of this, and the fact that the CEO and managers of Marcatus actually wanted to understand this better and do something about it. It is a rare and beautiful thing when a company’s incentives are perfectly aligned with those of their workers—lower productivity of farmers negatively affects their earnings and Marcatus’ profits. The fact that Marcatus also cares about the welfare of their farmers is an added bonus in this partnership.”

– Raji Jayaraman, FOS Co-Director and Associate Professor of Economics at ESMT Berlin

The first project in this partnership uses detailed data on yields, earnings, and local temperatures to identify the heat thresholds at which smallholder productivity begins to fall, and to estimate how much income farmers lose on dangerously hot days. The second project will move from understanding the consequences of extreme heat to acting on it by developing and testing practical adaptation strategies.