WWF reports climate change impacts on agriculture

LAHORE
Being an agrarian country, Pakistan’s economy heavily depends on agriculture which is facing an imminent threat from climate change.
This was stated by WWF-Pakistan Director-General Hammad Naqi Khan at the launch of a report, first of its kind in Pakistan, titled Climate Change Adaptation in the Indus Ecoregion: A Micro-Econometric Study of the Determinants, Impact and Cost Effectiveness of Adaptation Strategies here on Wednesday.
Accompanied by WWF-Pakistan report author, environmental and resource economist Ali Dehlavi and environmental lawyer and co-author of the report Ahmad Rafay Alam, Mr Hammad Khan said: “Pakistan ranks among top 10 countries vulnerable to climate change and this report highlights that our agrarian economy will get affected by it.
To decrease these impacts, it’s extremely important that we include climate change adaptation in our agriculture extension programmes and train farmers to face these challenges.”
In league with London School of Economics and Political Science and Lahore University of Management Sciences, he said WWF-P carried out the study to highlight the impact of climate change on the country’s agriculture and food security.
He said one of the key findings of the study was that climate change would likely to have a large cost on agricultural productivity in Pakistan. In particular, by 2040 assuming a 0.5 Degrees Celsius increase in average nationwide temperatures, an 8-10 per cent loss is expected across all crops corresponding to PKR 30,000 per acre, he said.
He said the report addressed optimal public policy response to the cost of climate change and called for adaptation to help improve crop resilience to temperature and rainfall variations.
The report findings also suggest that productivity of cotton and wheat crops (not rice) can be increased by up to 49-52 per cent if five on-farm adaptation measures are carried out, he said, adding such gains were possible for those farmers who were currently not applying these measures —-approximately half of all farmers in Sindh and Punjab.
Ali Dehlavi while speaking at the occasion called for a relatively low cost roll out of state-sponsored climate field schools in which on-farm adaptation measures were taught.
The schools will equip participants with the knowledge of climate resilient methods within tillage, agro-chemical input use, and crop husbandry and irrigation, he said, adding the cost of roll out for Punjab and Sindh would be affordable and limited to five agro-climatic zones (excluding rice belts in western Sindh and eastern Punjab).
He said public expenditure on training of farmers was a low lying fruit. He said such expenditure were far lower and had higher return on equity than expenses like canal lining to reduce existing water losses and building of new storage reservoirs.
Water supply expenditure in contrast to farmer training programmes is a significant drain on public resources, he said.
Previous research argues that to bring about a 1 per cent increase in crop productivity across Pakistan requires the addition of 0.47 bn m3 of water, he said, adding WWF-Pakistan believed that its latest crop-specific research merited serious consideration in terms of taxpayers’ value for money.
Ahmad Rafay Alam said that the recent 18th Amendment had changed the regulatory framework completely. Previously, with the responsibility of preparing and implementing climate policy resting in the Ministry of Environment, policy-making was an easily identifiable responsibility.
He explained after the 18th Amendment several subjects, including environment, natural ecology, health, food production and agriculture had devolved to provinces, but that provincial governments, especially Sindh and Punjab, had taken no measures to devise their own climate adaptation policies.
“The provinces are just as responsible for ensuring water and food security as the federal government is, but there appears no sense of urgency to respond to the magnitude of the challenge.”
According to WWF-P, Canada-based International Development Research Centre (IDRC) funded the study that relates to the application of over 20 years of monthly average rainfall and temperature data provided by the Pakistan Meteorological Department at a 25km grid resolution to a representative sample of farmers across Punjab and Sindh.