Building adaptive capacity to cope with increasing vulnerability due to climatic change in Africa – A new approach
Introduction
The greatest development challenge facing our increasingly globalized world is the long-term sustainable development of Africa’s rural poor (UN, 2000). Since the year 2000, the energies of development partners worldwide have focused on achieving measurable targets through the time bound (2000–2015) Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Whilst significant progress has been made towards these goals in the less developed regions of the America’s and Asia, the dryland regions of sub-Saharan Africa have not made the same progress (UN, 2005). This is principally because they have not been able to generate sustained economic growth of the type that now characterizes much of Asia. Indeed for much of Africa the situation is actually getting worse, as documented in “Our Common Interest,” the recent broad constituency report of the Africa Commission (2005).
“African poverty and stagnation is the greatest tragedy of our time. Poverty on such a scale demands a forceful response. And Africa – at country, regional, and continental levels – is creating much stronger foundations for tackling its problems. Recent years have seen improvements in economic growth and in governance. But Africa needs more of both if it is to make serious inroads into poverty. To do that requires a partnership between Africa and the developed world, which takes full account of Africa’s diversity and particular circumstances. (Africa Commission, 2005).”
Unfortunately, efforts to develop African economies and achieve the MDGs must contend with the increasing challenge of climate change (see for example, Love et al., 2006, Stern, 2006, UNDP, 2006). Most scientists now agree that global warming is inevitable, (IPCC, 2007), and that it will have major impacts on the climate worldwide and agricultural productivity, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa (Table 1).
In this paper we review the challenges of future climate change on smallholder agriculture in Africa, and what steps are required to build adaptive capacity within the research and development community of southern Africa to help smallholder farmers cope with these future challenges.
Section snippets
The challenges of future climate change in African smallholder agriculture
The agricultural systems of sub-Saharan Africa are diverse and vast, with water a transient resource in both space and time. Drought is a re-current feature of the southern African agricultural climate both between and increasingly within seasons (Twomlow et al., 2006). In fact, it is increasingly unusual for drought not to occur somewhere in southern Africa each year (UNEP, 2002), and it is universally accepted that climate influences development and must be integrated into the African
Mitigation and adaptation
Mitigation and adaptation are the two strands to any strategy for tackling the threat posed by climate change (Solomon et al., 2007). Mitigation attempts to minimise future climate change by reducing emissions including through weakening the link between economic growth and carbon emissions. Adaptation includes changes in management activities, institutional settings and infrastructure that enables effective response to the changes in climate that may occur. It needs to acknowledge that some
Characterizing and mapping the agricultural implications of climatic variability
There is clearly a need for the development of robust frameworks which can facilitate and guide risk assessment and management, longer term strategic planning and decision making by all ‘investors’ involved in rain-fed farming. Increasingly, experience shows how this can be facilitated by the use of long-term daily climatic data combined with field based research results, spatial weather generators, crop growth simulation and soil and water management models, geographic information systems and
Integrating climate risk management approaches to address stakeholder concerns
With the increasing availability, reliability and ease of use of such tools as described above, it now becomes possible for decision-makers and investors involved in agriculture to formulate a development agenda that integrates the following three key aspects of climate risk management, namely:
- 1.
Decision-support frameworks that provide a longer-term strategic understanding of the temporal and spatial distribution of climatic variability and its impact on the probability of performance and
An initiative to build adaptive capacity in Zambia and Zimbabwe
Both Zambia and Zimbabwe, target countries for this initiative, are signatories of the United Nations Conventions on Climate and Desertification, as both countries suffer from the adverse affects of climate, that leads to poor and even negative growth in the agricultural sector, and subsequent degradation of the environment as rural households try and meet their livelihood needs. Drought relief is a common feature, almost every year, in the drier areas of both countries, as there appears to be
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