Speakers, on second day of AgMIP Pakistan kick-off workshop and international seminar on climate change, urged the government make arrangements to set up an independent policy centre or think tank at University of Agriculture Faisalabad, which bring forth truth fearlessly on the bases of research with empirical evidence that would ultimately lead the country towards sustainable development and meet the challenges posed by anthropogenic activities of mankind to climate change and food security.
Professor Dr Iqrar Ahmad Khan UAF VC, Dr Gerrit Hoogenboom AgMIP Resource Person WSU, USA, Dr Xue Chun Wang, Dr Allah Bakhsh Director WMRC-UAF, Dr Muhammad Younus, Dr Asfhaq Ahmad Chatha, Dr Ghulam Rasul, Syed Aftab Wajid, Dr Muhammad Ashfaq, Dr Shakeel Ahmad, Ahsan Raza Sattar, and Naveed Iqbal were among the speakers.
Opening the house, Dr Iqrar Ahmad Khan UAF VC said there were about three thousand theses produced annually by the graduates, but very little number translated into goods and services, or could address the community issues or benefit the society. Dr Iqrar Ahmad Khan described the Agricultural Model Inter-comparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP), a major international effort linking the climate, crop, and economic modelling communities with cutting-edge information technology to produce improved crop and economic models and the next generation of climate impact projections for the agricultural sector.
He was of the view that Universities were meant to bring forward research based and fearless realities and lead the policy organs towards solutions confronting the society. He urged the scientists to conduct research on cost-benefit ratio of exporting rice worth 2 billion dollars and importing edible oil of billions of dollars that how does producing rice with abundant volume of water for export could make equilibrium with import of edible oil.
Professor Dr Ashfaq Ahmad Chatha PI of the project, briefed about the core objectives of his project, said that they intend to develop a climate change scenarios for the region, evaluation of DSSAT and APSIM models for simulating phonology, growth and yield of crops under different ecological zones, to estimate the impacts of future changing climate and economic scenarios on crop production and benefits to stakeholders in the region.
He said the project would help in selection of best management options (package of production technology) for economically efficient production of crops using the model under the changing climatic and soil conditions of different agro-ecological zones of Punjab, Pakistan that, he said, would help to improve substantially the characterisation of world food security due to climate change and to enhance adaptation capacity in both developing and developed countries. He said that analyses of the agricultural impacts of climate variability and change require a trans-disciplinary effort to consistently link state-of-the-art climate scenarios to crop and economic models. Crop model outputs, he said, were aggregated as inputs to regional and global economic models to determine regional vulnerabilities, changes in comparative advantage, price effects, and potential adaptation strategies in the agricultural sector.
He said the project was a wonderful combination of climate and crop models, and economic, and information technology protocols that would be presented to guide co-ordinated AgMIP research activities around the world, along with cross-cutting themes that address aggregation, uncertainty, and the development of Representative Agricultural Pathways (RAPs) to enable testing of climate change adaptations in the context of other global trends.
"The world-wide agricultural sector faces the significant challenge of increasing production to provide food security for a population projected to rise to 9 billion by mid-century while protecting the environment and the functioning of ecosystems" he added. He stressed the need to adapt to climate change by taking advantage of potential benefits and by minimising the potentially negative impacts to agricultural production. He said the project seeks to improve substantially the characterisation of world food security under climate change and to enhance adaptation capacity in both developing and developed countries. Professor Dr Gerrit Hoogenboom spoke on climate variability and climate change; decision making under the uncertainty. Professor Dr Muhammad Younus said that animals were also victim of climate change as such an unusual circumstances, the animal productivity suffers very severely.
Comments
Comments are closed.