Appraisal of Awareness Level of Farmers Regarding Biodiversity Conservation in District Sargodha, Punjab, Pakistan

Mother nature creates a delicate balance between living and non-living elements of the environment known as ecosystem and biodiversity. Any disruption in this balance may result catastrophic effect on the environment including impact on plant, animal and human life. Hence, efforts to maintain a healthy biodiversity through conservation are needed. Since the life is passing through the time of global warming and climate variation, new issues for farming community are on the rise. These issues are related to protection of natural environment and biodiversity which is one of the critical problems encounter by farmers of Pakistan. It is vitally important to take proactive measures to enact timely solutions to this issue, and avoid further losses in biodiversity. The present study was aimed to determine the awareness level of the respondents regarding biodiversity conservation. The results showed that farmers were relatively aware of regarding species diversity; however, they do not know the modern techniques to uphold crop and species diversity. Biodiversity concept of farmers is at very basic level and they know only limited conventional ways to maintain it. The statistical analysis showed weak significant association between factors responsible for biodiversity loss and two types of biodiversity since χ² (3) = 11.338, p = 0.010 and concluded that all factors are not equally responsible for loss in both types of biodiversity. Results showed that biodiversity conservation has its role in agricultural development. By conserving biodiversity, agricultural production can be increased. The results from Exploratory Factor analysis showed that by retaining three factors, the explained variation goes up to 54%.