**5. Conclusions**

The incidences of flood have increased over the years owing to global climate change. Enhancing livelihood options for the people depending on agriculture in several flood affected regions in India is challenging. Despite the technological improvements in terms of development of new tolerant seed varieties, or techniques, poor farmers often adapt to these flood impacts by abandoning farming altogether. To enhance the capacity of the farmers to deal with extreme flood events, advanced flood-tolerant seed varieties can be adopted. To this end, this study provides estimation of one such flood-tolerant rice variety–Swarna-Sub 1 for rice–which can be adopted by farmers during the major rice growing season called *Kharif* in India, at the district level for 17 major Indian states. The total seed requirement for the 17 states is approximately 92,800 tonnes, and the cost for procuring this amount was estimated to be INR 3800 million.

However, our estimates are the first attempt (as far as our knowledge) to quantify the potential need for flood-tolerant seeds such as Swarna-Sub1 that would need to be procured if major flood prone paddy/rice areas in India had to be supplied with floodtolerant seeds. Our methodology of combining remote sensing data for flood affected areas with land use pattern data can be used for need assessment by government departments to be better prepared in procuring seeds and allocating budget in enhancing agriculture resilience and flood proofing the vulnerable smallholder farmers. Future work would necessitate collecting more data on seed rate usage and sowing methods that can facilitate more accurate estimates. Moreover, future work can also explore the requirement for other major food grains along with considering the impact of droughts.

The procurement of stress-tolerant seeds is not enough by itself to ensure adoption by farmers, who will need these stress-tolerant seeds to become climate resilient. There is need to design integrated flood management policy to attract more farmers in these floods affected areas to adopt stress-tolerant seeds such as Swarna Sub1, and promote the use of climate information services and good agronomic practices in reducing crop losses. Although national and international agencies are beginning to recognize the extent to which extreme weather events such as flooding will affect agricultural production in India, their initiatives to adapt and cope with floods have been relief-oriented and rather short term [36]. Given the increasing flood occurrences, there is a need to develop a comprehensive seed production and dissemination strategy for rapid and targeted distribution of this flood-tolerant rice variety, Swarna-sub1, especially amongst the poor smallholder farmers residing in the flood-prone regions of India. Additionally, workshops and awareness drives on specific climate resilient technologies suitable for that region need to be undertaken to enable farmers to cope with extreme weather events and further enhance their adaptive capacity. In addition, training and capacity-building programs are necessary to enable farmers to adopt best practices and resilient technologies to increase yields.

**Author Contributions:** G.A. and N.K. developed the ideas for the project, analyzed data, interpreted results, and wrote most of the manuscript. N.K. also spent considerable time in data collection. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research was funded by the CGIAR Research Program (CRP) on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), and CGIAR Research Program (CRP) on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE), which is carried out with support from the CGIAR Trust Fund and through bilateral funding agreements. For details, please visit https://ccafs.cgiar.org/donors and https: //wle.cgiar.org/donors.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

**Acknowledgments:** The authors would like to thank the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries (MAFF). Further, the authors would also like to thank Archisman Mitra and Alok Sikka for their support in conducting the research and providing feedback. We thank Niranga Alahacoon, IWMI in producing GIS maps. Authors would like to thank the reviewers who helped in improving the manuscript.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
