The projections for this region are consistent across models: higher mean temperatures, more frequent and more intense heat extremes, a more variable monsoon with more of the rain falling in fewer events, and reduced winter precipitation from western disturbances.
Each of those hits a specific mechanism. A hot March shrivels wheat during grain filling, which happened in 2022. Fewer, heavier rain events mean more flooding and less recharge. Less winter rain means more irrigation for the wheat crop from an aquifer that is already over-drawn.
The Himalayan glaciers feeding the Sutlej, Beas, Ravi, Chenab and Jhelum are retreating. The immediate effect is more flow and the longer-term effect is less, and the timing is argued.
Punjab's agriculture is calibrated tightly to a climate that is moving, and its adaptive capacity is constrained by the same procurement structure that constrains everything else.
The state has a climate action plan. Implementation is limited by the fiscal position.
This is the frame within which every other page on this site about water, crops, soil and debt will be read in twenty years.
Punjab's own weather record is long. The observatory series at Ludhiana, Amritsar, Patiala and Ferozepur run back into the nineteenth century and the district rainfall registers kept for the revenue department go back further still. That is a better baseline than most places in the world have and very little has been done with it.
Heat is an occupational question before it is an agricultural one. The people who transplant paddy, cut fodder, work the brick kilns and lay road do it outdoors between April and July, and there is no heat standard in Indian labour law that requires anybody to stop.
The adaptations known to work are earlier sowing, heat tolerant varieties, less water intensive cropping and drainage that can take a heavy event. None of them is being done at scale.