‘Technological innovation vital for robust agriculture’

LAHORE: There is a need to adopt climate smart agriculture in Pakistan as a means for dealing with the changing climatic scenario, which can increase productivity in Pakistan as the country suffers from climatic extremes such as in 2011, 26 million people were affected by floods, which cost over 12 billion dollars, drought in Tharparkar region of Sindh hospitalised 21,000 inhabitants with a number of deaths of infants, etc.

This was stated by Dr Abrar Ch, a fellow of the Said Business School, University of Oxford during a special talk on, “Climate Smart Agriculture” organised under the auspices of the Information Technology University (ITU) the Punjab’s Centre for Governance and Policy here on Tuesday.

The climate smart agriculture assessment is a system through which different indices are factored in such as soil, climate risks, biomass and water availability, and their resulting impact on crop yield, nutritional values, and income, he said. Dr Abrar, who has been working on the topic of climate change and agriculture for a long time, said: “Before we look at the national or global level, it was the community level where change was coming and from where the solutions would also emerge.” Highlighting the environmental challenges currently facing Pakistan he added that world's temperatures have increased in the last 100 years and in the last 136 years nearly all of the hot years have been recorded since 2001. Focusing on agriculture, Dr Abrar said 94pc of Pakistan's water was used in agriculture and therefore its usage and regulation was imperative.

The acuteness of the situation was clear when one realised that Pakistan depends on just one Indus water system, which may disappear one day while carbon dioxide emission was mostly thought through industrial units only but in Pakistan over 41pc of the carbon dioxide emissions come from agriculture.