India, May 8 -- A 51-year analysis of 563 Indian districts showed that just 1degC of warming slashes national average crop yields by about 8%.

This erases years of productivity gains.

Heat and rainfall shocks hit key staples like rice, wheat, maize and pearl millet especially hard.

Some districts suffered yield losses of up to 39%.

A single degree Celsius (degC) of warming reduces the national average yield across all crops by around 8 per cent, a new analysis found. This highlights how rising temperatures and erratic rainfall are erasing years' worth of agricultural progress in the world's second largest agricultural producer.

The study, titled Climate Change and Crop Yields in India, based on data from 1966 to 2016, found that both...