Climate-Smart Agriculture in Pakistan: Implications for Climate Risk Management, Food Security, and Poverty Reduction

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has emerged as a framework for developing and implementing robust agricultural systems, which simultaneously improve food security, living conditions in rural areas, facilitate adaptation to climate change, provide mitigation benefits and improve household welfare. In recent decades, climate variability has made the world agricultural systems more uncertain, causing reproductive failure and severe yield reductions in many crops. At the same time, a growing population with increasing food demand and poverty appeal to adopt CSA at the household level. As adoption rates in developing countries like Pakistan are low, the adverse impacts of climate change such as temperature increases, erratic rainfall patterns, extreme weather conditions significantly undermine agricultural production and food systems in such countries, where hunger, malnutrition, and poverty are already predominant. Climate-smart agricultural (CSA) practices appear to be useful tools in the form of adaption strategies to manage agricultural farms that reduce climate risks and increase farm productivity in the developing world. This study, therefore, contributes to the growing literature on the impact of CSA practices on farm performance, and rural household welfare by exploring climate risk management, the contribution of single or joint adaptation strategies in enhancing farm net returns, food and nutrition security, as well as poverty reduction in rural Pakistan. In particular, the study first examines adaptation to extreme weather conditions impact on farm net returns, and risk measures of this outcome variable (volatility, downside risk exposure, and kurtosis) by using endogenous switching regression (ESR) model to account for selection bias. Secondly, the study employs multinomial endogenous switching regression (MESR) to explore climate risk management through multiple adaptation practices and their impact on household welfare. The study also inspects factors influencing farmers’ decisions to adopt these practices. Finally, the marginal treatment effect approach is employed in analyzing the food and nutrition security as well as the poverty status of rural farm households. The empirical results reveal that adoption of CSA practices exerts a positive and significant impact on reducing volatility, downside risk exposure, and kurtosis of farm net returns. The results further reveal that farmers who adopted CSA practices obtain higher farm net returns. The collective findings from the study show that farmers’ decisions to adopt CSA practices are mainly influenced by temperature and rainfall shocks, education of household head, extension services, the experience of past climate-related shocks (such as floods, droughts, and pest infestation, etc.), climate change information, climate change perception and climate-resilient trainings. Credit constraint is the major barrier faced by the farmers in adopting CSA practices, causing low adoption rates. In the multiple CSA practices’ adoption analysis, the results reveal that soil and water conservation coupled with crop rotation as soil and water conservation exerts the maximum impact on farm net returns earned from adapted plots followed by input mix, diversifying seed variety, and changing cropping calendar, respectively. The findings also show that all of the CSA practices significantly reduce downside risk exposure and crop failure of farm households. Besides, controlling household and farm-level characteristics, climate variability, and regional dummies, the empirical results confirm that observable and unobservable heterogeneity significantly varies across farm households. The results further reveal that adoption of CSA practices significantly reduces household food insecurity and increases household dietary diversity at the lower level of unobserved resistance to adoption and vice versa. The findings also show that farmers who adopted CSA practices experience a lower level of poverty than traditional farmers. These findings call for development policy measures to promote CSA practices across the country through climate change awareness, climate-resilient trainings, and access to extension as well as formal and informal credit sources to enhance adoption rates for increasing agricultural productivity and expanding food systems for a growing population

Complex Reactions and Dynamics

Starting from the general idea of reaction kinetics, their classification, concentrations, and chemical equilibrium, we will focus on their activation energy and complexity arising during the chemical reaction. As in complex and higher-dimensional chemical problems, we need special arrangements, specifically, in the case when a system attains different completion paths or several routes. The stiffness of the system can be removed if we distinctly measure their available reaction routes and get a comparison between them and overall reactions. Secondly, the construction and comparison of the invariant region of the manifold based on the modern decomposition techniques in different available reaction routes allow us to discuss the dynamical properties of the system

Adaptation Implications of Climate-Smart Agriculture in Rural Pakistan

In this paper, we analyze the drivers of the adoption of climate-smart agricultural (CSA) practices and the impact of their adoption on farm net returns and exposure to risks. We use recent farm-level data from three agroecological zones of Pakistan to estimate a multinomial endogenous switching regression for different CSA practices used to reduce the adverse impact of climate change. These strategies include changing input mix, changing cropping calendar, diversifying seed variety, and soil and water conservation measures. The empirical results show that the adoption of different CSA practices is influenced by average rainfall, previous experience of climate-related shocks, and access to climate change information. The findings further reveal that adoption of CSA practices positively and significantly improves farm net returns and reduces farmers’ exposure to downside risks and crop failure. The results also reveal significant differences in the impacts of CSA practice adoption on farm net returns in different agroecological zones. Thus, policies aimed at achieving sustainability in agricultural production should consider agroecological, specific, climate-smart solutions

Effectiveness of Digital Game Based Learning Strategy in Higher Educational Perspectives

Digital game-based learning strategy is now widely used in various fields such as education, marketing and advertising. This learning strategy has attracted great attention from scholars and practitioners in recent years due to its effectiveness in various educational fields. As more research studies favored the constructive impact of games on the learning process, more and more investigators are dedicated to developing digital educational games to enhance learning skills for 21st century requirements. The objectives of the current investigation were: to present a comprehensive and systematic review of the literature of previous studies on the effectiveness of digital game-based learning strategy in a higher educational context; to report the role of various adult learning theories in digital game-based learning strategy; to highlight some barriers and their solutions in digital game-based learning strategy. A total of 20 previous studies on digital game-based learning strategy in higher educational perspectives published from 2008-2021 were selected by inclusion and exclusion criteria for conducting this investigation. The results of the current investigation revealed that digital game-based learning strategy has deep effects on the learning skills of the learners in higher educational perspectives. The digital game-based learning strategy is a better option for the improvement of engagement of learners towards learning and critical thinking skills

Role of Surgery in Spinal Metastases

Spinal metastases constitute two-third of all cases of bone metastases. Surgical intervention in these tumours has been recommended in highly selective cases, for confirming diagnosis, stabilizing the spine, and decompressing nerves or spinal cord for alleviation of pain and preservation of function.In this article,the authors have reviewed available evidence on role of surgery in spinal metastases and have presented results of selected papers on this vast topic

Table Structure Extraction with Bi-directional Gated Recurrent Unit Networks

Tables present summarized and structured information to the reader, which makes table structure extraction an important part of document understanding applications. However, table structure identification is a hard problem not only because of the large variation in the table layouts and styles, but also owing to the variations in the page layouts and the noise contamination levels. A lot of research has been done to identify table structure, most of which is based on applying heuristics with the aid of optical character recognition (OCR) to hand pick layout features of the tables. These methods fail to generalize well because of the variations in the table layouts and the errors generated by OCR. In this paper, we have proposed a robust deep learning based approach to extract rows and columns from a detected table in document images with a high precision. In the proposed solution, the table images are first pre-processed and then fed to a bi-directional Recurrent Neural Network with Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) followed by a fully-connected layer with soft max activation. The network scans the images from top-to-bottom as well as left-to-right and classifies each input as either a row-separator or a column-separator. We have benchmarked our system on publicly available UNLV as well as ICDAR 2013 datasets on which it outperformed the state-of-the-art table structure extraction systems by a significant margin.Comment: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) 2019, Sydney, Australi

Assessing the Impact of Information Communication Technology (ICT) on Women’s Empowerment in Southern Punjab, Pakistan

Women’s empowerment is a procedure that provides control of intensity and assets to women, and completely changes them after sometime through their dynamic support in that procedure. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of Information Communication Technology (ICT) on the social and economic empowerment of women in three selected districts of Southern Punjab, Pakistan viz. Multan, Vehari and Khanewal. For this purpose, cross-sectional data of 384 women (100 from Multan, 100 from Khanewal and 184 women from Vehari district) were obtained through random stratified sampling from both rural and urban areas. Women empowerment index (WEI), ANOVA, t-test and ordinary least square (OLS) methods were used for analysis. The findings concluded that the practice of ICT significantly affected the social and economic empowerment of the women. It is recommended that women should be given free access to use ICT for creating new opportunities and more empowerment in the society

Fatalism, Climate Resiliency Training and Farmers’ Adaptation Responses: Implications for Sustainable Rainfed-Wheat Production in Pakistan

Climate change is a severe threat to the agricultural sector in general and to rainfed farming in particular. The aim of this study was to investigate the factors that can potentially affect the adaptation process against climate change. This study focused on wheat farmers and farming systems in the rainfed agroecological zone of Pakistan. Farmers’ data related to climate change fatalism, the availability of climate-specific extension services, socioeconomic and institutional variables, and farm characteristics were collected. A logit model to assess farmers’ decisions to adopt an adaptation measure and a multinomial logit model to assess their choice of various adaptation measures were used. The results showed that fatalistic farmers were unlikely to implement climate change adaptation measures. The variables related to the climate-specific extension services, including farmers’ participation in training on climate-resilient crop farming and the availability of mobile communication-based advisory services, had highly significant and positive impacts on farmers’ decisions and their choice of adaptation measures. Input market access and tractor ownership also had positive and significant impacts on farmers’ decisions to adapt and their choice of adaptation measures. This study highlights the need to improve rainfed-wheat farmers’ education levels to change their fatalistic attitudes towards climate change. Furthermore, government action is needed to provide climate-specific extension services to ensure sustainable production levels that will ultimately lead to food and livelihood security under a changing climate.Fritz Thyssen StiftungStiftung fiat panisPeer Reviewe

Cryptanalysis for Secure and Efficient Smart-Card-Based Remote User Authentication Scheme for Multi-server Environment

Multi-server authentication is going to be an integral part of remote authentication with the passage of time. The remote authentication has been part and parcel of internet based communication. In the last decade several multi-server authentication techniques has been presented. However there is still a need of more efficient and robust techniques. Lately, Saraswathi et al., presented a multi-server authentication scheme that has been found under much vulnerability like stolen card attack, misrepresentation attack, and forward secrecy attacks. This paper presents the cryptanalysis for Saraswathi et al. scheme and shows the review analysis