Indian Summer Monsoon

Have you ever taken a walk in the rain for the purpose of just being overwhelmed by the droplets tapping you, waking you up? The monsoon season brings with it many joys - puddles, walks in the rain, warm beverages, and cozy blanket fort evenings. Apart from the joys I experience from it, the Indian Summer Monsoon is a phenomenon that provides water to sustain India's agricultural production. In the past few decades, the irregularity of the precipitation has hurt the livelihoods of farmers across the Indian Subcontinent. Specifically the state I grew up in, Maharashtra, gets hit pretty hard by this climate-change induced irregularity. As much as this is a local issue, it is also global since the agriculture that depends on the Indian Summer Monsoon supports nearly a quarter of the world's population.

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During my time at Ithaca College in the Fall semester of 2022, I took a class on critical skills for environmental scientists. Through the course of this class, we learnt skills needed to write a scientific paper including problem solving, navigating scientific literature, scientific inquiry, quantitative analysis, data sets and graphs, systems thinking, and many more tools used by scientists when conducting research. The end result of the class is to write a paper on a topic of your choice.

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I chose to study the Indian Summer Monsoon phenomenon to understand not only how it impacts the farmers' lives, but also how farmers can build resilience to changing baselines of weather and climate. There is no contesting that farmers are treated as third-class citizens in India, although they are responsible for food supply and much of Indian exports. During this time, I delved into the impact that the changing climate has not only on the food supply for a country, but also the impact that is has on the people whose lives are closely reliant on this season.

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If you're still here and would like to read my paper, here is the link re-directing you to the file.

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