The sustainability of global food production has been facing many threats, including climate change. The adaptation to such threats is both a challenge as well as an opportunity, especially for woman-operated farms in Pakistan. The challenge is how to devise measures and look for options to counter its impact, while the opportunity lies in developing new techniques, skills, and interventions leading to innovativeness. As women farmers are constrained regarding resources, cultural, societal, and personal reasons in Pakistan’s context, they particularly need innovative behavior and decision power to adapt to climate change. This study aims to measure the decisional empowerment and innovativeness of women farmers and their role in adopting different climate-smart agricultural (CSA) practices at the farm level. To this end, data from 384 farms where women were majorly involved are utilized in a multivariate probit model and propensity score matching to reveal various aspects of women’s role in adopting CSA practices. Results reveal that most women farmers lacked decisional power related to productive resources such as sale/purchase and renting of farmland, using farm machinery, and availing credit. Their decisional empowerment and innovativeness positively affected the adoption of CSA practices at the farm level. Females with more decisional power and innovativeness adopted more CSA practices than women with weaker decisional power and innovativeness. Therefore, the world can benefit greatly from giving more power to women in agriculture in terms of increased adoption of CSA practices, consequently improving food security and mitigating climate change. This outcome will assist in achieving the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals of gender equality (SDG5) and climate action (SDG 13).

The COVID-19 pandemic led to an economic crisis and health emergency, threatening energy efficiency consumption, sustainable food diversity, and households’ nutrition security. The literature documented that environmental threats can divert attention from renewable energy and food security challenges that affect humans’ environmental behaviors. The COVID-19 crisis has consistently influenced environmental behaviors, as it primarily decreased income and disrupted food systems worldwide. This study investigated the COVID-19 consequences on household income, sustainable food diversity, sustainable energy consumption, and nutritional security challenges. The study used a self-structured online survey due to non-pharmaceutical restrictions and collected data from 728 households. The investigators applied t-test and logit regression to analyze the data for drawing results. Descriptive statistics show that COVID-19 has adversely affected the income of more than two-thirds (67%) of households. The pandemic has influenced households’ food consumption, energy, and dietary patterns to safeguard their income. The t-test analysis indicated that households’ food diversity and energy consumption significantly declined during the pandemic, and households consumed low-diversified food to meet their dietary needs more than twofold compared to pre-pandemic levels. The results showed that all nutrient consumption remained considerably lower in the COVID-19. Cereals are the primary source of daily dietary needs, accounting for over two-thirds of total energy and half of the nutrient consumption amid COVID-19. The share of vegetables and fruits in household energy consumption dropped by 40 and 30%. Results exhibited that increasing monthly income was inversely associated with worsening food diversity and intake with energy efficiency. Compared with farmers and salaried employment, wage earners were 0.15 and 0.28 times more likely to experience a decline in consuming food diversity. Medium and large households were 1.95 times and 2.64 times more likely than small, to experience decreased food diversity consumption. Launching a nutrition-sensitive program will help minimize the COVID-19 impacts on energy consumption, food diversity, and nutritional security for low-income individuals. This survey relied on the recall ability of the households for the consumed quantities of food commodities, which may lack accuracy. Longitudinal studies employing probability sampling with larger samples can verify this study’s insightful results.

Environmental education plays a significant role in improving environmental knowledge and shaping the eco-friendly lifestyles of young people. Young people’s daily actions and habits will determine the future of the Earth as a planet. The literature regarding youths’ environmental knowledge, climate change awareness, environmental attitude, and their impact on pro-environmental intentions and sustainable household consumption practices is very scarce. Therefore, this study explored the relationship between environmental knowledge, climate change awareness, environmental attitude, and the pro-environmental intentions of university students. The study also assessed the moderating effect of environmental education on pro-environmental behavior and sustainable household consumption practices, providing a comparative analysis of students with and without environmental education, which is unique in the literature. The data were collected from 2137 Chinese university students selected through a purposive and random sampling method through survey questionnaires. Descriptive statistics and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) were used to analyze the collected data. The findings revealed that environmental knowledge, climate change awareness, and environmental attitudes of the students positively affected their pro-environmental intentions. Moreover, pro-environmental intentions also positively affected the adoption of sustainable practices. The result also showed that the impact of pro-environmental intentions on sustainable consumption practices was greater for those whose education included environmental courses than for those whose education did not. Therefore, it is suggested that environment-related courses be incorporated into the study plans of each discipline as a compulsory subject for promoting green intentions and shaping eco-friendly lifestyles for environmental sustainability.

Traditional energy consumption raises greenhouse gas emissions, which is a major concern in China. Agricultural energy consumption accounts for one third of China’s greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, current patterns of energy consumption on farms are both unsustainable and inadequate since rural communities in emerging nations have limited access to energy sources. This study explores the factors affecting the adoption of renewable energy on farms and examines the effect of such adoption on technical efficiency. The data were collected from 801 farmers selected through a multistage random and purposive sampling method in a face-to-face survey in China. Logistic regression, data envelopment analysis and propensity score matching were used to analyze the data. The descriptive statistics depicted that renewable energy technology was adopted by more than 25% of the total farmers. The logistic regression results depicted that education, farm size, government financial support, perceptions of renewable energy (usefulness, cost effectiveness, environmental friendliness and information availability) and farmer entrepreneurial orientation dimensions (risk-taking, innovativeness and pro-activeness) all significantly affected the adoption of renewable energy technology on farms. Farmers who perceived renewable energy as more useful and cost-effective than conventional energy technology were 1.89 and 2.13 times more likely to adopt it on their farms, respectively. Farmers who perceived renewable energy as more environmentally friendly than traditional energy technology were 1.54 times more likely to use it on their farms. The findings also showed that innovative farmers were 2.24 times more likely to adopt renewable energy technology on their farms. The propensity score matching results showed that the technical efficiency of adopters of renewable energy was 10% higher than that of nonadopters. The study suggests that agriculture must be transformed to fulfill the existing and forthcoming demand for food and energy in an impartial and ecologically sustainable manner.