Climate change to cut Pak crop yields by 10 percent: report

April 16, 2015
LAHORE: World Wide Fund for Nature-Pakistan (WWF-Pakistan) launched its climate change report titled Climate Change Adaptation in the Indus Ecoregion: A Micro-Econometric Study of 


the Determinants, Impact and Cost Effectiveness
of Adaptation Strategies
on Wednesday.


The report was produced in collaboration with the London School of Economics-Political Science (LSE-PS) and the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and highlights the impact of climate change on Pakistan’s agriculture and food security. According to findings of this report, climate change will likely 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 Rs 30,000 per acre.


The report addresses the optimal public policy response to the cost of climate change and urges adaptation to climate change that can help to improve crop resilience to temperature and rainfall variations. The report findings also suggest that productivity of cotton and wheat crops (but not rice) can be increased by up to 49-52 per cent if 5 on-farm adaptation measures are carried out. Such gains are possible for those farmers who are currently not applying these measures, approximately half of all farmers in Sindh and Punjab.


The WWF-Pakistan study author, Ali Dehlavi, an environmental and resource economist, urged that a relatively low cost roll out of state sponsored climate field schools in which on-farm adaptation measures are taught. He said that schools will equip participants with the knowledge of climate resilient methods within tillage, agro-chemical input use, and crop husbandry and irrigation.


Dehlavi further said that the cost of roll out for Punjab and Sindh will be affordable and limited to 5 agro-climatic zones (excluding rice belts in western Sindh and eastern Punjab). He said that 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.


Ahmad Rafay Alam, environmental lawyer and co-author of a political economy study of climate change, water- and food-security prepared by LUMS in collaboration with WWF-Pakistan, said that the recent 18th Amendment has changed the regulatory framework completely. He said “The provinces are just as responsible for ensuring water- and food-security as the Federal Government, but there appears no sense of the urgency to respond to the magnitude of the challenge.”


WWF-Pakistan Director General Hammad Naqi Khan said “Pakistan ranks among the top ten countries vulnerable to climate change. He said that since Pakistan’s economy depends completely on agriculture and this report highlights that our agrarian economy will get affected by it. He said that in order to decrease these impacts, its extremely important that we include climate change adaptation in our agriculture extension programmes and train our farmers to faces these challenges.” The study was funded by the Canada-based International Development Research Centre (IDRC) conducted by WWF-Pakistan’s economists in collaboration with LSE economists
Curtsey:Daily Times’