Impacts of climate change on yield of cereal crops in northern climatic region of Pakistan.

This study investigates the impacts of climate change on yield of selected cereal crops (wheat and maize) in the northern climatic region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province of Pakistan for the period 1986-2015. The first-generation unit root tests such as the Levin, Lin, and Chu (LLC), augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF)-Fisher, and the second-generation unit root tests such as cross-sectional augmented Im-Pesaran-Shin (CIPS) and cross-sectional ADF (CADF) are used to check stationarity of the series. The cointegration among the variables is discovered via Pedroni test and Westerlund method. The long- and short-run impacts of climatic variables (average precipitation, maximum temperature, and minimum temperature) on yield of wheat and maize crops are assessed through the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model. The empirical findings reveal that average precipitation has a significantly positive impact on yield of both crops in long- as well as short-run. The results further reveal that the effect of average minimum temperature on both crops is insignificant in long-run. However, the short-run effect of average minimum temperature is significantly positive on yield of maize crop but insignificant on yield of wheat crop. In long-run, an increase in average maximum temperature negatively affects crop yield. In short-run, however, it positively affects the yield of wheat and maize crops. The study recommends that increase in area under cultivation, development of advanced irrigation system, and farmers' access to metrological information will help in lowering the drastic impacts of climate change on crop productivity.

Socio-economic characteristics influencing farmers' willingness-to-adopt domestic biogas technology in rural Pakistan.

Worldwide, biogas programs fail to achieve broad acceptability because of failure to account for socio-economic constraints during program design and implementation. This paper attempts to revisit the relationship between socio-economic characteristics of rural households and adoption of biogas technology at the household level in Pakistan by using a predicted willingness-to-adopt approach in addition to considering energy-related variables which have been rarely accounted for in previous literature. The study is based on primary data collected from 200 households across eight villages in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Province. A chi-square test of association is applied to determine the relationship between farmers' socio-economic characteristics and their willingness-to-adopt domestic biogas technology. Results confirm that socio-economic factors such as education, total landholdings, cost of energy consumption, duration of electric shortfalls, occurrence of smoke-related diseases, and possession of livestock had a significant relationship with farmers' willingness-to-adopt biogas technology. The study concludes that for the successful deployment of biogas technology in rural areas, it is imperative to account for the socio-economic conditions of the population.