Effect of climate change on cash crops yield in Pakistan

Abstract

Climate change is a global challenge having a significant potential to alter crop yields worldwide. Thus, the determination of crop yield is important in the prospect of food security for agro-economic regions like Pakistan especially in the upcoming decades. Therefore, the focus of this research was to investigate the historical and projected spatial and temporal changes in climatic parameters, and their impacts on cotton and sugarcane yield in the southeast region of Punjab, Pakistan, by the Mann-Kendall test for baseline (1981–2015) as well as projected (2020–2099) periods. ArcGIS was used to check the spatial variation in climatic parameters between the four climatic stations of south Punjab. Two regional climatic models, the Australian Community Climate and Earth-System Simulator version 1 and Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Conformal Cubic Atmospheric Model, were used with two representative concentration pathways (RCP), RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 scenarios. It was found that the total amount of precipitation can be more than the baseline by 47–68 mm. However, precipitation trends were inconsistent. In summary, there seems to be strong evidence that climate change is influencing especially the temperature trends which were statistically significant in this region. As compared with baseline, the maximum temperature is likely to increase from 2 to 4 °C, and the minimum temperature can increase from 3 to 6 °C until the end of this century. Changes in temperatures can reduce crop yield especially cotton and sugarcane up to 6% and 16% per annum, respectively, until far future.