Pakistan is one of those developing countries that have been suffering from the problems brought by developed nations. For instance, the current issue of climate change is mainly caused by the world’s highly industrialized nations that too due to massive emission of greenhouse gasses (GHG)and Pakistan despite having a trivial count (0.72%) in GHG emission is ranked among the highly vulnerable countries under the threat of climate change. According to the 2018 Global Climate Risk Index report by German-watch, Pakistan fall among the 10 most-affected countries due to climate change.
During the last few decades, the planet has experienced a series of changes in the environment such as alterations in temperature, increasing frequency of droughts, floods, and changes in rain patterns.These changes are due to the excessive emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere produced by the human activities. Currently, more than 500 climate-induced disastrous events are recorded each year around the globe, which was reported to be only 125 in 1980. Climate modeling reported an increase in temperature between 0.5 to 2 degree Celsius and between 1 to 7 degree Celsius by 2030 and 2070 respectively, which has an adverse impact on different sectors of the economy, including agriculture.
Agriculture is one of the most climate-sensitive sector because extreme events and changes in weather pervasively affect the crop production. During the past few years, variations in the environment have negatively affected the agricultural sector as the yield of major cereal crops has been significantly reduced by the sudden rise in temperature, irregular precipitation, and extreme droughts. It is reported that an increase of 1 degree Celsius in the temperature reduced the wheat production by 5-7%. This is an alarming situation for food security in the current scenario of high growing population. And countries in South Asia are likely to be more affected because of their high population and agro-based economies. According to the IPCC (intergovernmental panel on climate change) and World Bank, South Asian countries particularly Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India are predicted to be highly affected because of rising temperature which will reduce the cereals production from 4 to 10% by 2100.
These challenges are much severe for developing country like Pakistan, which is already struggling to ensure food security and is fighting against poverty. Pakistan, having an arid climate and being an agro-based economy fall among those few vulnerable countries which are at high risk of climate change. In the last two decades, there has been a significant increase in the frequency and intensity of catastrophic climatic incidents in the country which placed the people at high risk of calamities such as storms, extreme floods, droughts, changes in precipitation and destructive nature of rainfall. In Pakistan, all sectors of agriculture, particularly crop production, has been significantly affected due to the persistent incidence of these severe climate events and variation in the environmental pattern. Recently, Pakistan has experienced a number of severe climate events such as disastrous floods of 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014 and a period of extreme droughts between the 1990 and 2003. If we take note of the economic loss, damage of 2 million hectares of non-harvested crops in the flood of 2010 caused a loss of more than 10 billion USD to the poor economy of the country. These calamities are expected to further increase in the future, as per IPCC Pakistan is to experience a further reduction in the yield of the cereal crop. These impacts are very critical for Pakistan, where Agriculture is the backbone of the economy as it contributes about 20% in the national GDP and provides employment to 43% of the country’s workforce. More than 60% of the population lives in rural areas which majorly rely on agriculture. In this scenario, agriculture must be placed as the first priority to make the sector resilient against the climate change through certain adjustments or adaptation strategies in the farming systems. Adaptation to climate change is the way to reduce or avoid the negative impacts of environmental changes at the farm level in the form of changing crop variety, altering irrigation and changes in soil management practices.
Although climate-induced losses in crop production are a threat to agriculture but through the suitable adaptation policy these impacts could be reduced and even avoided. But the dilemma is that in Pakistan adaptation capacity of the agricultural system is very poor due to the absence of basic policy and infrastructure. As a matter of fact, Pakistan has no agricultural adaptation policy against the changing climate.
In the present it is important to develop and implement an effective climate change adaptation policy with its principal focus on the crop sector. In this regard, sincere efforts are required equally at all level for instance, as governmental level investments should be made in the development of adaptation strategies policies; institutions should play their part in building adaptive capacities. While at field level farmers are required to make efforts by the successful implementation of plans and utilizing the local skills against the changing climate.
This author is a PhD student at China Agricultural University Beijing and research associate at the International poverty reduction center of China (IPRCC) Beijing, P.R. China.