Month: August 2022

Smallholder farmers are among the most susceptible populations to the effects of climate change, but efforts to aid in farmer adaptation are hampered by a lack of knowledge on how they are coping with and adapting to the changes. In order to tailor adaptation programmes to the various contexts of smallholder farmers, more knowledge is required about how different types of smallholder farmers perceive and react to climate change differently.

Smallholder farmers are at great risk due to climate change, which also poses a danger to global advancements in eradicating poverty, ensuring food security, and fostering sustainable development (Vermeulen et al 2012). Around the world, there are 475 million smallholder farmers who work less than 2 hectares of land, many of them are destitute, endure food insecurity, and live in extremely risky circumstances (Lipper et al 2014). Due to their reliance on rain-fed agriculture, cultivation of marginal land, and lack of access to technical or financial assistance that may help them engage in more climate-resilient agriculture, smallholder farmers are particularly vulnerable to climate change (Cohn et al 2017).

Despite mounting evidence of smallholder farmers’ susceptibility to climate change and growing interest in ensuring food security in the face of it (Vermeulen et al. 2012), adaptation efforts are still hampered by a lack of knowledge about how smallholder farmers are coping with and adapting to the change. In order to develop policies, institutional responses, and strategies for smallholder farmer adaptation, policy makers, donors, and practitioners need precise, context-specific data on the effects of climate change that smallholder farmers are experiencing, as well as whether (and how) they are modifying their management strategies to deal with these impacts (Castellanos et al 2017).

Demographics of the family have an impact on farmers’ ability to make wise adaptation decisions. Farm size, income, market accessibility, access to climate information and extension, and animal output also have a favourable impact. In places like Zambia, where small-scale agriculture is essential to economic growth, food security, and local lives, understanding the effects of climate change on smallholder farmers and creating effective adaptation techniques are crucial challenges. Additionally, additional knowledge is required about the variations in smallholder farmer vulnerability and responses across various farming systems and socioeconomic contexts. By examining the factors of adaptive ability, the demands for resilience of smallholder farmers who have the potential to act may be broken down for targeted climate change and intervention.

Biblography

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This is part of a sequence related to my thesis writing for MscCCAFS completion. Check out their website at www.nuigalway.ie/ccafs for a brief overview of the course outline. In this post, I will highlight some key concepts discussed in the thesis paper

Climate Adaptation

Climate adaptation methods must be scaled up to improve livelihood sustainability and climate resilience in resource-constrained smallholder agricultural systems. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes adaptation as the process of responding to changing climate and its effects (IPCC, 2022). Adaptation is also known as an anthropocentric reaction that seeks to limit harm or capitalize on favorable possibilities for mankind. Maladaptation is defined as climate change adaptation that has unexpected negative consequences

Agriculture and the food industry are crucial to global food security and long-term growth. While there is a need to cut agricultural and food sector emissions, there is also a need to rapidly scale a diverse portfolio of practises, technologies, and systems to transition (or “transform”) to agriculture and food systems that are better suited and robust to future climates. The urgency of implementing adaptation in agricultural and food systems is heightened by the already visible strong trends in climate change, as well as the substantial potential of more extreme changes including greater frequency and severity of unfavourable climate-related occurrences.

Maladaptation

Maladaptation is a major emphasis of the 2022 IPCC report. Back in 2014, the IPCC defined maladaptation as “activities that may raise the probability of severe climate-related consequences, increased susceptibility to climate change, or lower wellbeing, now or in the future.” But, in order to really comprehend the technique, we must first comprehend adaptation—and why we so sorely require it.

Studies show that as climate change accelerates, people become more sensitive to dangers such as flooding and excessive heat. “When we adapt, what we strive to do is reduce the negative effect of these hazards by minimizing exposure and vulnerability, and thus, decreasing risk.” However, because climate change is unexpected and occurring in real-time, leaders are improvising answers, and some of their adaptation efforts are unsuccessful. One thing that is more evident is that there have quick solutions to climate dilemmas and in ways that lock us into particular types of growth trajectories, we risk these adaptation techniques backfiring and making us more vulnerable to climate change.

However, eliminating maladaptation will be difficult. It necessitates a rigorous examination of present programme flaws, such as the climate finance from affluent nations that continues to fall through. It’s also vital to realize that no one method will work everywhere—why that’s adaptability exists

How to do it better

To avoid maladaptation, planners and leaders must listen to all groups of people, whether they be illegal immigrants, women, or religious minority. This entails going outside of the NGOs and other groups that traditionally make climate-planning choices, getting on the ground, and gathering local feedback to establish the true source of the problem. This is also emphasised in the most recent IPCC report, which emphasises a comprehensive approach to strengthening ecological stewardship, education, and involvement in future mitigation and adaptation approaches.

Biblography

IPCC 2022. Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.Summary for policymakers. Cambridge University Press.

KNICKEL, K., REDMAN, M., DARNHOFER, I., ASHKENAZY, A., CHEBACH, T. C., ŠŪMANE, S., TISENKOPFS, T., ZEMECKIS, R., ATKOCIUNIENE, V. & RIVERA, M. 2018. Between aspirations and reality: Making farming, food systems and rural areas more resilient, sustainable and equitable. Journal of Rural Studies, 59, 197-210.

NGUYEN, D., VU, H., PHAM, T., TRINH, T., BARLIS, A., DAM, V., SIMELTON, E. & LE, T. 2020. Smart adaptation to climate through adoption of agro-climatic services. In: Training course on “Methods and skills for transferring technical advances to production organization” organized by Vietnam National Agricultural Extension Center (NAEC) held at Phu Tho Province on 23-28 November 2020. Training material on climate services module. 61p.

STONE, J. & RAHIMIFARD, S. 2018. Resilience in agri-food supply chains: a critical analysis of the literature and synthesis of a novel framework. Supply Chain Management: An International Journal.

WATKISS, P., HUNT, A., BLYTH, W. & DYSZYNSKI, J. 2015. The use of new economic decision support tools for adaptation assessment: A review of methods and applications, towards guidance on applicability. Climatic Change, 132, 401-416.

WEZEL, A., HERREN, B. G., KERR, R. B., BARRIOS, E., GONÇALVES, A. L. R. & SINCLAIR, F. 2020. Agroecological principles and elements and their implications for transitioning to sustainable food systems. A review. Agronomy for Sustainable Development, 40, 1-13.

I have recently done my thesis focused on Avoiding Smallholder Farmers’ Climate Maladaptation Breaking Down Farmers’ Potential to step up

Along with CGIAR CLIMBER, I completed this portion of the MScCCAFS course in NUI Galway. In the study, we used Zambia as a case study to examine the difficulty of utilizing Dorward’s typology to determine if farmers in Zambia had the capacity to move up, out, or hang in. This is a crucial stage in determining which farmers are most likely to step up and execute adaptation strategies. The second thing we looked at was whether or not the smallholder farmers who can take on adaption techniques run the risk of unfavorable outcomes.

To get access to the thesis paper send a request to T.Gadisi1@nuigalway.ie