Agricultural adaption: climate change and food security

WWF

Today we are going to talk about climate change and food security in Africa.  Why is Africa so vulnerable to the impact of climate change on food security?

The issue of food security is made up of 3 interrelated areas: food availability, food access and food utilization – climate change will impact all of those 3 areas negatively.

Africa relies heavily on crop and livestock for feeding its populations, and effects of climate variability, droughts and floods are posing a major threat (Niang et al. 2014, 1218).  Reduced growing season periods will increase the number of failed crops, and likely lead to a transition from mixed crop-livestock systems to pure livestock systems in several regions, especially in the Western Sahel and south-eastern Africa (Jones and Thornton, 2009).

Cereal and maize yields are among the most threatened crops across Africa – It has been estimated that 35% of wheat yields might be lost and up to 30% of maize yields (in some regions) by mid century (Nelson et al. 2009). For many crops, uncertainties about the precise impact exist (as banana, bean yields, groundnuts..) , due to differences across crop varieties, altitudes (high/low) and regions (Niang et al. 2014).

In general, rising temperatures will diminish the extent of suitable zones for growing crops to ‘marginal’ in many regions, which will not only have severe effects on food availability for local populations, but also on crop exports such as tea, coffee and cocoa (Niang et al. 2014, 1219).

Climatic changes will affect livestock by water scarcity and decreasing crop productivity, as well as degrading grazing areas (Niang et al. 2014). 

pinterest

Adapting Africa’s agriculture to climate change will be a major challenge, amongst other things because of the lack of climate data and reliable observation systems.

An interesting case of potential ‘agricultural adaption’ is the cassava yield, a non-cereal crop that is ‘benefiting’ from climate change and might therefore be able to replace threatened cereal crops or maize. Estimations show that climate change will bring increased suitability to grow cassava due to the ‘CO2 fertilization effect’ (Jarvis et al., 2012), in addition to the fact that this crop is quite resistant to high temperatures and low rainfall. The CO2 fertilization effect claims that the increase of C02 in the atmosphere will increase the rate of photosynthesis in plants (Cartwright 2013). 

 

The cassava crop is described by the FAO as the ’21^st century crop’ and provides a promising illustration of adaptive agricultural intensification (FA0 2013). This graph shows that Cassava has been highly important on a global scale and that it can be compared to maize in its scale. Considering that maize is severely threatened by the impacts of climate change, cassava might be able to replace this crop.

Agricultural intensification of specific resilient crops is just one kind of adaptive measures that can being taken to counter climate change impacts. In the next blog post, I will talk about other adaption strategies relating to soil management, agricultural water control and climate risk management (AAA Initiative).

 

 

References

Cartwright, J.  (2013). "How does carbon fertilization affect crop yield?". environmentalresearchweb. Environmental Research Letters. Retrieved 3 October 2016.

 

FAO (2013) Save And Grow: Cassava. Rome: N.p., 2013. http://www.fao.org/3/a-i3278e.pdf

 

Nelson, G.C., M.W. Rosegrant, J. Koo, R. Robertson, T. Sulser, T. Zhu, C. Ringler, S. Msangi, A. Palazzo, M. Batka, M. Magalhaes, R. Valmonte-Santos, M. Ewing, and D. Lee, 2009: Climate Change: Impact on Agriculture and Costs of Adaptation. Food Policy Report No. 19, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington, DC, USA, 30 pp

 

Niang, I., O.C. Ruppel, M.A. Abdrabo, A. Essel, C. Lennard, J. Padgham, and P. Urquhart, 2014: Africa. In: to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, pp. 1199-1265.

 

Jones, P.G. and P.K. Thornton, 2009: Croppers to livestock keepers: livelihood transitions to 2050 in Africa due to climate change. Environmental Science and Policy, 12(4), 427-437.