DG AARI Urges Stakeholders To Devise Strategy To Combat Challenges Of Climate Change

Director General Ayub Agricultural Research Institute (AARI) Dr. Muhammad Nawaz Khan urged all stakeholders to devise a comprehensive strategy to combat the challenges posed by climate change

FAISALABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 10th Jan, 2023 ) :Director General Ayub Agricultural Research Institute (AARI) Dr. Muhammad Nawaz Khan urged all stakeholders to devise a comprehensive strategy to combat the challenges posed by climate change.

He was addressing an International Workshop organized by Precision Agriculture and Analytics Lab, National Centre in Big Data and Cloud Computing, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad (UAF) at Center for Advanced Studies auditorium.

He said that the climate change was playing havoc with the agriculture sector. He urged all stakeholders to devise a comprehensive plan to fight the challenges at the national level. He further said that adoption of modern trends was imperative to make agriculture sector compatible with global standards and ensure food security. Prof. Dr. Asif Kamran from UAF said that the country was placed in the red zone in terms of per capita water availability. He added that at the inception of the country, the per capita water availability was 5600 cubic meter whereas it had reduced to around 900 cubic meter now. He added, "We have to create awareness and take measures to promote rational usage of water and make each drop more productive through precision irrigation technologies. We need to adopt precision agriculture as every grain of seed, every millimeter of agro-chemicals, every horsepower of machinery, and every man-hour of farm labor counts to remain competitive and sustainable in face of global economic and climatic changes.

" He called for remote sensing in agriculture to estimate the crop yield that would help take timely trade related decisions.

Dr Azeem Khan, Lead Remote Sensing Scientist at the Department of Planning and Environment, Government of New South Wales, Australia said that Pakistan was a water stress country, it had low crop yields and water productivity, untapped land and water resources and a growing population. He said that the transparent information on water availability and use in the country through satellite remote sensing would be useful for not only water management purposes but also for identification of system improvements needs and investment decisions. "The confluence of big data, remote sensing, connectivity, and artificial intelligence can help us manage our water resources and increase crop water productivity substantially," he added.

Dr Khalid Hussain said Pakistan had become one of the worst victims of the climate changes as it was the real challenge to address the issue. He said that the modules of the hands-on training workshop were designed to train young faculty and Post graduate students for the latest techniques in Crop Estimation and Water Accounting.