How Climate Change Is Reshaping Pakistan's Farming Seasons

A calendar that no longer holds

For generations, farming in Pakistan followed two dependable seasons: the rabi, sown in winter, and the kharif, sown with the onset of the summer monsoon. Sowing dates, seed choices and irrigation schedules were built around that rhythm. That predictability is now breaking down. The Pakistan Meteorological Department reported in 2025 that monsoon onset had shifted, disrupting kharif sowing by two to three weeks in recent years, a change that ripples through every decision a farmer makes in the following months.

Dr Ghulam Muhammad Ali of the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council has put it plainly: the traditional rabi and kharif seasons can no longer be treated as strictly reliable, and farming now requires a more dynamic approach to the cropping calendar than the fixed dates of the past.

The heat factor

Wheat, Pakistan's most politically and nutritionally important crop, is particularly exposed. The Ministry of National Food Security and Research estimates a potential yield decline of 6 to 9 percent for every 1 degree Celsius rise in mean temperature, a figure with direct implications for national food security given wheat's central place in the diet. In both 2022 and 2024, unusually early heat anomalies in March and April caused grain shrivelling in standing wheat crops across Punjab, according to the PMD's Agromet Division, a phenomenon that quietly erodes yields even when the harvest looks intact from a distance.

It would be wrong, however, to describe this as uniform decline. The research is clear that not every crop or every farmer is affected equally. Some maize varieties have shown localised gains where farming practices have adapted, a reminder that the picture is uneven rather than universally bleak.

Cotton on the move

Cotton tells a similarly complex story. The Pakistan Central Cotton Committee recorded in 2025 a geographical shift in Punjab's cotton belt southward, driven by extreme heat stress and the proliferation of whitefly, a pest that thrives in warmer conditions. In South Punjab, farmers have responded by switching away from cotton towards maize or sugarcane, crops seen as more resilient to the current combination of heat and pest pressure.

In Nawabshah and other parts of Sindh, extreme summer temperatures have pushed some farm labour into nighttime harvesting simply to avoid the worst of the daytime heat, a practical adaptation that speaks to how directly climate stress now shapes the working day.

The human cost of uncertainty

Behind these shifts are farmers absorbing real financial risk. Back-to-back crop failures, driven by a mix of heat, delayed monsoons and pest outbreaks, are pushing many smallholders deeper into debt cycles that are difficult to escape. Female agricultural workers, who make up a significant share of the labour force during manual harvesting tasks such as cotton picking, face severe heat stress with little protection or recourse.

The wider effect reaches consumers too. When staple crop yields fall, food price inflation follows, hitting low-income households hardest. Agriculture still employs approximately 38 percent of Pakistan's labour force, according to the 2024 Pakistan Bureau of Statistics Labour Force Survey, which underlines just how much of the country's economic and social stability rests on decisions made in individual fields.

The adaptation gap

Solutions exist, but access to them remains limited. The World Bank estimated in 2025 that use of climate-smart seed varieties among smallholder farmers stood below 15 percent, a gap that leaves the majority of farms working with seed stock poorly suited to today's heat and rainfall patterns. The FAO's 2025 assessment noted that smallholders continue to bear the brunt of this uncertainty largely without access to crop insurance, leaving them exposed when a season goes wrong.

There has been movement on the institutional side. The Pakistan Agricultural Research Council introduced new high-yield, heat-tolerant wheat varieties in 2025, and the PMD has worked with telecom operators to roll out mobile-based Agromet advisories in 2024 and 2025, giving farmers more localised, timely information on weather risk. PARC also updated its agro-ecological zones map in 2024, the first such revision in decades, an acknowledgement that the old zoning no longer reflects current climate realities.

A dynamic calendar for a changed climate

The evidence gathered from the 2022 floods offers a useful indicator of how far behaviour is already shifting: FAO Pakistan found that 20 to 30 percent of farmers in affected areas of Sindh and Balochistan had permanently altered their cropping choices in the aftermath. That is not a story of collapse, but of adaptation under pressure, farmers making rational decisions with the tools and information available to them.

This regional unevenness matters for policy design. In the Potohar region, rain-fed wheat farmers who depend entirely on winter rainfall, without canal irrigation to fall back on, are struggling with shifting rain patterns in a way that irrigated farms in central Punjab are not. A national response built around a single crop calendar or a single seed variety is unlikely to serve either group well; what is needed is advice and support calibrated to distinct agro-ecological zones, which is precisely what PARC's 2024 rezoning exercise was designed to enable.

Whether that adaptation can keep pace with the underlying changes in heat, monsoon timing and pest pressure will depend heavily on whether climate-smart seeds, insurance and district-level advisories reach smallholders at scale, rather than remaining concentrated among better-resourced farms. The traditional calendar is not coming back. The task now is building one that can flex with an increasingly unpredictable climate, season by season and region by region.