Climate Change Impacts on Sugarcane Productivity: Adaptive Strategies for Resilient Agroecosystems

Abstract

Climate change, water shortages, and elevated temperatures make it hard to cultivate sugarcane sustainably especially in the semi-arid areas. Climate-smart agriculture can serve as an effective measure of improving the productivity of crop while making it resilient to environmental stresses. Hence, the current study was conducted for evaluating the performance of the selected climate smart practices such as drip irrigation, wheat straw mulching, and heat-resistant sugarcane variety on sugarcane yield in Jaranwala, District Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan. The trial was arranged in the Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) with four treatments and three replications. The treatments were the conventional farmers’ practice (CPF-237), drip irrigation (CPF-237), wheat straw mulching at 8 t ha⁻¹ (CPF-237), and heat-resistant sugarcane variety (CPF-249) in basin irrigation. The yield of the sugarcane crop was measured by harvesting the net plot area at crop maturity and then calculating the cane weight in tons per hectare (t ha⁻¹). The data was subjected to analysis of variance (ANOVA) and the means of different treatments were compared using the Least Significant Difference (LSD) test at 5% probability. The results indicated that all climate-smart practices showed significant improvement in cane yield when compared with conventional farmer practice. The maximum cane yield was observed in case of drip irrigation (72 t ha⁻¹), heat tolerant variety (70 t ha⁻¹), and wheat straw mulching (68 t ha⁻¹), while the minimum cane yield was obtained in case of conventional farmer practice (55 t ha⁻¹). The findings show that the drip irrigation improved cane yield by 30.9%, heat tolerant variety by 27.2%, and wheat straw mulching by 23.6% than control.