Analysing the Impact of Climate Change on Cotton Productivity in Punjab and Sindh, Pakistan

The study analyses the impact of climate change on productivity of cotton in Pakistan using the district level disintegrated data of yield, area, fertilizer, climate variables (temperature and precipitation) from 1981-2010. Twenty years moving average of each climate variable is used. Production function approach is used to analyse the relationship between the crop yield and climate change. This approach takes all the explanatory variables as exogenous so the chance endogenity may also be minimized. Separate analysis for each province (Punjab and Sindh) is performed in the study. Mean temperature, precipitation and quadratic terms of both variables are used as climatic variables. Fixed Effect Model, which is also validated by Hausman Test, was used for econometric estimations. The results show significant impact of temperature and precipitation on cotton yields. The impacts of climate change are slightly different across provinces— Punjab and Sindh. The negative impacts of temperature are more striking for Sindh. The impacts of physical variables—area, fertilizer, P/NPK ration and technology, are positive and highly significant. The results imply educating farmers about the balance use of fertilizer and generating awareness about the climate change could be feasible and executable strategies to moderate the adverse impacts of climate change to a reasonable extent.