Climate change-induced variability in rainfall patterns and temperature has caused significant losses to the agriculture sector in Pakistan. Crop diversification is recognized as an effective risk management strategy for farmers to cope with climate-related risks and is therefore a potentially sustainable community-based solution for enhancing community resilience to climate change. This chapter examines how past exposure to extreme weather events, risk attitude, and other community and farm characteristics affect the farmer’s decision of crop diversification. Using farm-level data from 480 farmers in Sindh province of Pakistan, the study examines the determinants of crop diversification decisions. The results show that previous exposure to flood or excessive rainfall in the community, farm size, and farmer’s risk attitude significantly affect crop diversification. Furthermore, location-specific factors account for differences in local climatic and agro-ecological conditions and significantly determine the extent of crop diversification. Keywords Crop diversification Climate change Resilience Risk attitude Pakistan

Use of solid fuel for cooking is one of the major sources of household indoor air pollution, especially in developing countries. Around 3 billion people still cook and heat their homes using open fires and leaky stoves, burning biomass fuel, i.e., wood, crop residues, animal dung, wood charcoal and coal as their primary source of domestic energy. The present study was conducted to assess the perceived level of health risks in rural households associated with indoor air pollution caused by cooking (cleaner and solid) fuels. For this purpose, the data was collected from 700 rural households from 5 districts of Sindh Province, Pakistan. Using the Probit regression model, factors such as household attributes, cooking activities, behavioral health effects, physical health effects, and regional factors were controlled. The results indicate that solid fuels revealed a positive effect on the factors used in the models. In addition, the pseudo-R2 values indicate the goodness of fit of the models, which varied from 0.16 to 0.38. Which depicts a good fit of our models in explaining the perceived risk of physical and behavioral effects by polluting indoor air through solid fuels used by households. Furthermore, there is a need for strong policy-making and public awareness programs to mitigate the exposure and associated health risks of indoor air pollution. Therefore, public and private organizations and academia working on environmental health should develop an action plan for reducing indoor air pollution for the future.

Pakistan is an agrarian economy confronting both risk and uncertainty. Rural migration to urban and off-farm work is increasing in the country. Off-farm work assists in decreasing risk and uncertainty while technical efficiency is linked with off-farm employment. This research effort aims at investigating the underpinnings of production characteristics, risk, and efficiency across categories of rice farmers, i.e., with and without off-farm work, by developing two stochastic frontier models. Empirical results reveal that both groups of farmers are using inputs in different ways, subsequently production varies across these groups. Farmers in both the categories have common characteristics in terms of production function. Coefficient of family size is positively significant to the group of farmers having off-farm work while negatively associated to their counterparts. High temperature and prevalence of disease found risk increasing factors. Though one group is more efficient, in general both groups are technically inefficient. The short-term policy focus should be diverted to ensuring availability and timely application of inputs to enhance efficiency. In the long run, policy initiatives need to be taken towards rural development by providing employment facilitating social and economic infrastructure, along with focus on Research and Development (R&D) particularly keeping the rice belt in view.