Illuminating Empirical Evidence of Climate Change: Impacts on Rice Production in the Punjab Regions, Pakistan

Climate change can disrupt food availability and reduce access to food by affecting agricultural production in the world. Thus, the current empirical study investigates the impacts of climate change on rice production over the different regions of Punjab, Pakistan for the period of 1979-2018. The bound test co-integration method with the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) was used to explore the symmetric relationship between climate change and rice production. Furthermore, this study employed a nonlinear ARDL (NARDL) approach to investigate the asymmetric relationship between climate change and rice production. The results of symmetric ARDL indicate that in the long run there is a negative relationship between average maximum temperature and production of rice in all three regions. The results indicate that in the long-run average minimum temperature (Tmin) has a significant and negative association with the production of rice during the kharif season in Southern and Western Punjab. While in Central Punjab, minimum temperature (Tmin) has a positive association with the production of rice. The rainfall indicates that in the long run as rainfall increases in Central Punjab, it would cause to reduce the production of rice, while in the Southern and Western Punjab increased rainfall during the kharif season cause an increase in the production of rice. Moreover, the results of NARDL indicate an asymmetric relationship between climate and rice production. The dynamic multiplier analysis also supports the results by showing the dominance of the high impact of a positive and negative component of temperature on the production of rice in investigating three regions of Punjab, Pakistan.