Climate change is a global problem since many countries worldwide are becoming increasingly vulnerable to natural disasters. Numerous climate models in various studies project a decline in agricultural productivity that will mainly be due to excessive heat in tropical and subtropical regions, especially in Southeast Asia. As a Southeast Asian country, Malaysia is no exception to this problem. Hence, the present study aimed to examine the impact of climate change on rice yields in Malaysia. A panel data approach was adopted using data from 1987 to 2017 on eight granary areas in Peninsular Malaysia. The main objectives were to assess the impact of climate variables (i.e., minimum and maximum temperature and precipitation) on rice yield and the variance of the impact during the main season and off-season. Our regression results indicate that precipitation was not statistically significant in all model specifications for both the main and off-season. While the maximum temperature was found to be negatively associated with yield during the off-season, the minimum temperature showed a positive effect in both cropping seasons. We used the HadGEM3-GC31 N512 resolution model based on the high-emission Shared Socioeconomic Pathways 8.5 scenario (SSPs-8.5) from the High-Resolution Model Intercomparison Project (HighResMIP) of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) to project future climate change in 2030 and 2040. The projected results indicate that rice yield would show a more positive trend by 2040 when compared to the previous decade, ranging from −0.02 to 19.85% during the main season and −2.77 to 7.41% during the off-season. Although rice yield is likely to increase in certain areas, other areas are projected to experience negative effects. Hence, adaptation at the farm level remains crucial, specifically during the off-season, since climate change could widen the gaps in rice yields between cropping seasons and among granary areas.

This study explored food security and climate change issues and assessed how food sovereignty contributes to addressing the climate change impacts on entire food systems. The study aimed to contextualise food security, climate change, and food sovereignty within Sri Lanka’s current development discourse by bringing global learning, experience, and scholarship together. While this paper focused on many of the most pressing issues in this regard, it also highlighted potential paths towards food sovereignty in the context of policy reforms. This study used a narrative review that relied on the extant literature to understand the underlying concepts and issues relating to climate change, food security and food sovereignty. Additionally, eight in-depth interviews were conducted to obtain experts’ views on Sri Lanka’s issues relating to the thematic areas of this study and to find ways forward. The key findings from the literature review suggest that climate change has adverse impacts on global food security, escalating poverty, hunger, and malnutrition, which adversely affect developing nations and the poor and marginalised communities disproportionately. This study argues that promoting food sovereignty could be the key to alleviating such impacts. Food sovereignty has received much attention as an alternative development path in international forums and policy dialogues while it already applies in development practice. Since the island nation has been facing many challenges in food security, poverty, climate change, and persistence of development disparities, scaling up to food sovereignty in Sri Lanka requires significant policy reforms and structural changes in governance, administrative systems, and wider society.

This paper reviews the studies from various disciplines and countries on the impacts of climate change on food security and its four dimensions, namely food availability, accessibility, food utilisation and the stability of food systems. Reviewed literature has shown that the impacts of climate change on food security would be devastating. If any of these four dimensions of food security is affected, the impacts will vary from local to global. However, most of the studies have focussed on food availability, so the other three dimensions of food security were not given due attention. This paper, therefore, reviews the impacts of climate change in all food security dimensions based on a narrative review approach. In summary, the impacts of climate change at the micro-level, involving households’ food access and utilisation, and food stability were still less discussed and understood as compared to food availability issues. This review consequently emphasises the importance of future researches on climate change and food security to concentrate on other dimensions of food security.

The knowledge transfer program (KTP) in Malaysia was instituted to facilitate knowledge transfer, collaboration, and interaction between academics in public higher institutions and other stakeholders. These programs are divided into community or industry programs. Under the community program, academics collaborate with a community partner to utilize their research findings in the community environment. This quantitative study attempts to assess KTP based on academics’ postproject responses to online questionnaires. The participants in this study consist of 132 academics of Malaysian public universities of Rolling 1 to Rolling 4 projects between 2011 and 2016. Of 132 individuals invited to participate, 84 of them (64%) took part in the online survey. These data were analyzed using analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Duncan’s range test. The findings indicate that the KTP has enabled academics, irrespective of position, to deploy their ideas and knowledge in a real-world community setting. The relationship between academic position and learning experience in transferring knowledge, however, is inverse: the higher the level of an academic position, the lower the learning experience. The findings also exhibit the experience and challenges that one would expect from the involvement of academics in a community KTP.

The contemporary development discourse is largely concerned with mitigating vulnerabilities, building resilience, and achieving sustainability. The interconnection of the various factors involved in vulnerability, sustainability assessments, and resilience building necessitates a comprehensive analysis. However, bringing together these factors for a multidimensional analysis of vulnerability or sustainability poses significant challenges. Thus, it is imperative to establish a framework that combines multidimensional vulnerability and sustainability analysis to overcome vulnerabilities and achieve sustainable development. This article presents a framework integrating sustainability into multidimensional vulnerability analysis to establish sustainable intervention. Firstly, we review the key concepts and multidimensional frameworks of vulnerability analysis. Secondly, we discuss the various domains and drivers of vulnerabilities and the role of sustainability in analysing the impact of multidimensional vulnerability and framing sustainable intervention strategies. Lastly, we argue that mitigating vulnerability drivers is central to the preliminary framework, which can be achieved by aligning sustainable intervention strategies with the sustainability goals (SDGs).