Impact of climate change in Agriculture

• Every crop has a temperature range for their vegetative and reproductive growth.
• When temperature falls below the range or exceeded the upper limit then crop production faces constraints.
• A study found that 10 C increase in maximum temperature at vegetative, reproductive and ripening stages there was a decrease in Aman rice production by 2.94, 53.06 and 17.28 tons respectively (Islam, 2008).
• With the change in temperature (by 20C and 40C the prospects of growing wheat and potato would be severely impaired. Production loss may exceed 60% of the achievable yields (Karim, 1993).

Impacts on Nepalese Agriculture

• Agriculture is the most important livelihood sector and provides a substantial proportion of rural incomes and employment opportunities.
• Rapid agricultural development along with improvement of the environment conservation is a pre requisite to alleviate rural poverty, the development of agriculture will to a large extent determine alleviation or aggravation of poverty in the Hindu-kusH region
• The country is susceptible to disasters, including flash flood, slow melting, ice avalanche in mountains and droughts and floods in the terai.
• The raising temperature and emission of CO2 to some extent is helpful in production by enhancing photosynthetic processes, water use efficiency, shortening physiological period.
• The impacts on agriculture are decrease of productive land in some region and increase in some other region. So, it is a complex problem to the world (Pathak et. al., 2003)
• Rising CO2 promotes plant growth and if the CO2 gas doubles, yields will increase by 40%.