Climate change, water importance ‘Community-based organisations must be contacted to create awareness among farmers’

KARACHI: Pakistan Businesses Forum (PBF) Vice President Jahan Ara Wattoo has said that the community-based organisations must be contacted to create awareness among farmers about the phenomenon of climate change and the importance of water.

She said that changing climate had threatened the productivity of the agriculture sector, making it vulnerable economically, socially and in cultural perspective.

Crop simulation model-based studies by Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) depicted that there were significant reductions in wheat, rice and maize yields in the arid, semi-arid and rain-fed areas of Pakistan under various scenarios by the mid and end of the century, she added.

She said that Pakistan had significant variations in rainfall and temperature; therefore, its agriculture was relying heavily on river supplies. She said that climate shift had squeezed the monsoon pattern to two months with heavy to very heavy rains, thus leading to more incidents of floods as witnessed this mid-year, which to significant erosion of soil, inundation and medium to high floods in canal-irrigated areas and flash floods in hilly areas.

The PBF vice president said that other issues of the crop sector included inadequate mapping of soil health for each agro-ecological zone for promotion of climate-smart to eco-friendly crops. There were insufficient farm community storages and availability of climate-smart on-farm water management technologies, she added.

Jahan Ara Wattoo said that Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) was an integrated approach to develop technical, policy and investment conditions to achieve sustainable agriculture development for food security under climate change by adopting and building resilience and reducing carbon emissions.

However, through community participation initiatives including federal and provincial governments collaboration to improve application of balanced nutrition, especially potash application, pest scouting, promotion of mechanization, introduction of short-duration varieties, stress management against heat and drought, fortification of crops through breeding and continuous review of production plans by learning through best practices, she added.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022