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

CRAFT: A library for easier application-level Checkpoint/Restart and Automatic Fault Tolerance

In order to efficiently use the future generations of supercomputers, fault tolerance and power consumption are two of the prime challenges anticipated by the High Performance Computing (HPC) community. Checkpoint/Restart (CR) has been and still is the most widely used technique to deal with hard failures. Application-level CR is the most effective CR technique in terms of overhead efficiency but it takes a lot of implementation effort. This work presents the implementation of our C++ based library CRAFT (Checkpoint-Restart and Automatic Fault Tolerance), which serves two purposes. First, it provides an extendable library that significantly eases the implementation of application-level checkpointing. The most basic and frequently used checkpoint data types are already part of CRAFT and can be directly used out of the box. The library can be easily extended to add more data types. As means of overhead reduction, the library offers a build-in asynchronous checkpointing mechanism and also supports the Scalable Checkpoint/Restart (SCR) library for node level checkpointing. Second, CRAFT provides an easier interface for User-Level Failure Mitigation (ULFM) based dynamic process recovery, which significantly reduces the complexity and effort of failure detection and communication recovery mechanism. By utilizing both functionalities together, applications can write application-level checkpoints and recover dynamically from process failures with very limited programming effort. This work presents the design and use of our library in detail. The associated overheads are thoroughly analyzed using several benchmarks

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

Do Farmers Adapt to Climate Change? A Macro Perspective

Greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change, and agriculture is the most vulnerable sector. Farmers do have some capability to adapt to changing weather and climate, but this capability is contingent on many factors, including geographical and socioeconomic conditions. Assessing the actual adaptation potential in the agricultural sector is therefore an empirical issue, to which this paper contributes by presenting a study examining the impacts of climate change on cereal yields in 55 developing and developed countries, using data from 1991 to 2015. The results indicate that cereal yields are affected in all regions by changes in temperature and precipitation, with significant differences in certain macro-regions in the world. In Southern Asia and Central Africa, farmers fail to adapt to climate change. The findings suggest that the world should focus more on enhancing adaptive capacity to moderate potential damage and on coping with the consequences of climate change

An integrated assessment model for food security under climate change for South Asia

The present study develops an integrated assessment model (IAM) for food security under climate change for South Asia. For IAM, initially, an econometric model is estimated that identifies the impact of climate change on crop yields, using the historical relationships between temperature, precipitation, and the production of cereals. Subsequently, future projections have been collected for temperature and precipitation from climate models of the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5), and the previous econometric model is applied to obtain the implied future cereal yields changes. Then, the yield variations are fed into a multiregional Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model, calibrated to the GTAP 9 database, taking the form of decreases in factor-augmenting productivity of the grains sector. Further, the present study evaluates the effects of climate change on an individual South Asian country. The results indicate that change in climate decreases food production, increases food prices, decreases food consumption, and thus affects the welfare. Trade and fiscal policy responses are investigated to combat the problem of food security. It is revealed that these two policies fail to compensate climate change damage in all the selected South Asian countries

Effective Utilization of Supervised Learning Techniques for Process Model Matching

The recent attempts to use supervised learning techniques for process model matching have yielded below par performance. To address this issue, we have transformed the well-known benchmark correspondences to a readily usable format for supervised learning. Furthermore, we have performed several experiments using eight supervised learning techniques to establish that imbalance in the datasets is the key reason for the abysmal performance. Finally, we have used four data balancing techniques to generate balanced training dataset and verify our solution by repeating the experiments for the four datasets, including the three benchmark datasets. The results show that the proposed approach increases the matching performance significantly

An Optimized and Cost Effective Power Management System for End-users of Electricity

This paper presents a novel technique of Optimized and Cost Effective Power Management System (OCEPMS) for end users of electricity. The technique incorporates all the three important aspects of a power management system and gives a complete microcontroller based low cost solution. These aspects include: power factor improvement, voltage optimization and surge / spike suppression. For power factor improvement, an algorithm is devised which automatically switches capacitors based on real time calculated requirements. A soft switching mechanism is used for the purpose of bringing capacitors in or out of the circuit depending upon the overall inductive load. For voltage optimization purpose, a circuitry is included in the design which manages incoming voltage and regulates it to a level more suitable for home appliances. Furthermore, to protect the system from dangerous and harmful surges and spikes transmitted through supply line, a surge suppression circuitry is also incorporated in the design. The proposed design is physically developed and experimentally tested with various domestic loads like compact florescent lamps, chokes, pumps and a combination of induction motors. Experimental results validate proposed approach and show that, up to 15% reduction in domestic electricity bills can be achieved by using the developed power management system

Decomposition Analysis of Energy Consumption in Pakistan for the Period 1990-2013

The final energy consumption in Pakistan has doubled during the last two decades. Investigating the factors responsible for changes in energy use is important for future projections. Decomposition techniques enable us to quantify the contributing factors in aggregate energy change. This study attempts to investigate the factors behind the aggregate change in energy consumption over the period 1990-2013 using Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) decomposition technique. LMDI decomposes the overall change in energy use into three effects namely, activity, structural, and intensity effects. Results of the study suggest that observed increase in Pakistan’s energy consumption is primarily due to the activity and structural effects. The energy intensity of overall economy has decreased showing an increase in energy efficiency, though at a decreasing rate over time. The quantification of energy imports based on projections shows that Pakistan may face serious fiscal challenge by 2025 due to extremely large energy import bill and possible energy price shocks. There is a need to put efforts towards reducing the gap between energy supply and demand, diversifying domestic energy production including increased reliance on renewables, efforts towards energy and environment conservation, and efficient use of available resources