Empirical Assessment of Climate Change on Major Agricultural Crops of Punjab, Pakistan

Global warming is exacerbating climate affect on agricultural productivity. The objective of present study is the empirical assessment of climate change on three major agricultural crops of Punjab, Pakistan. A variant of Cobb-Douglas production function is used for the panel data of the districts of Punjab covering period 1981 to 2012.Overall findings of the study reveal that temperature has positive impact on the production of wheat crops during the planting and harvesting stage. However, temperature negatively affects the production of wheat during the flowering stage. Rainfall has negative association with the production of wheat during all three stages. Further, results indicate that rainfall, minimum temperature and humidity positively affect the production of rice crop during planting and negatively affect during harvesting. Impact of rainfall during all three stages of cotton crop has positive effect on its production. Nevertheless, increase in the temperature during first and second stage has negative effect on the production of cotton crop, but during third stage it has positive impact. On the basis of empirical analysis, this study suggests that Government should conduct seminars and workshops for the awareness of farmers to mitigate the worse effect of climate change. Moreover, development of new varieties of seeds and allocation of more resources should be encouraged to provide the security against the problems of climate change.