Climate Change and Food Security

Africa and the Caribbean

Elizabeth Thomas Hope

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315469713
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Global climatic change has resulted in new and unpredictable patterns of precipitation and temperature, the increased frequency of extreme weather events and rising sea levels. These changes impact all four aspects of food security – availability, accessibility, stability of supply and appropriate nourishment – as well as the entire food system – food production, marketing, processing, distribution and prices.

Climate Change and Food Security focuses on the challenge to food security posed by a changing climate. The book brings together many of the critical global concerns of climate change and food security through local cases based on empirical studies undertaken in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. Focusing on risk reduction and the complex nature of vulnerability to climate change, the book includes chapters on the responsiveness of farmers based on traditional knowledge, as well as the critical phenomenon of food insecurity in the urban setting. Other chapters are devoted to efforts made to strengthen resilience through long-term development, with interventions at the regional and national levels of scale. It also examines cross-cutting themes that underlie the strategies employed to achieve food security, including equity, gender, livelihoods and governance.

This edited volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, food security, environmental management and sustainable development.

Part I
Trends in climate change in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean

1
Trends in climate change in Africa

Walter Leal Filho, Isaac Kow Tetteh and Haruna Moda Musa

Introduction

Climate change impacts are known to adversely affect livelihoods in the dry lands of Africa, especially in terms of longer and harsher droughts, shorter and intense precipitation, and floods. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has documented the scope of this problem in many publications, especially in its latest assessment report, or AR5 (IPCC 2014).

It is widely acknowledged that, even though African countries contribute very little to global CO₂ emissions, Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change and climate variability. This is so due to a number of reasons. Some of them are:

• a) the existence of multiple stressors across Africa, of which land degradation and desertification are examples,
• b) declining runoff from water catchments across the continent,
• c) high dependence on subsistence agriculture, which in turn increases the impacts of droughts, which negatively interfere with food security,
• d) inadequate government mechanisms, and
• e) rapid population growth occurring at various levels.

These factors, combined with limited access to financial resources and technologies lead to a limitation on adaptive capacity, which is further exacerbated by factors such as extreme poverty, frequent natural disasters and heavy dependence on rain-fed agriculture.

The likely impacts of climate change are expected to add to these existing stresses and worsen the effects of land degradation. In addition, increased temperature levels are expected to cause damage to agriculture – also leading to additional loss of moisture from the soil, unpredictable and more intense rainfall, and higher frequency and severity of extreme climatic events such as floods and droughts.

These factors are already leading to a loss of biological and economic productivity and putting population in dry lands at risk of short and long-term food insecurity. The Fourth IPCC African Assessment Report estimated that by 2020, between 75 and 250 million people are likely to be exposed to increased water stress and that rain-fed agricultural yields could be reduced by up to 50 per cent in Africa if production practices remained unchanged.

Drought-prone areas are inter alia particularly deemed to suffer complex localized impacts of climate variability or change. In the Sahel, for instance, changes in temperature and rainfall patterns have reduced the length of the vegetative period and made it difficult to continue the cultivation of traditional varieties of long and short-cycle millets. Given the social, legislative, market and weather-based sources of vulnerability already prevailing in the region, reduction in agricultural productivity and land area suitable for agriculture, due even to slight climate change, will cause disproportionately large detrimental effects (IPCC 2007).

The communities most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change in Africa are those which inhabit the dry land areas. For instance, the World Health Organization (WHO) states that changes in the patterns in the spread of infectious diseases are likely to be a major consequence of climate change in the dry lands. WHO (2015) indicates that malaria represents a particular and an additional threat in Africa. There are between 300 and 500 million cases of malaria in the world each year, with a very high proportion of those occurring in Africa, largely among the poor. Malaria causes between 1.5 and 2.7 million deaths a year, of which more than 90 per cent are children under five years of age. In addition, malaria slows economic growth in Africa by up to 1.3 per cent each year (UNEP 2005).

Climate change is almost certainly making an already bad situation worse and may already be contributing to the problem of poverty. In one highland area of Rwanda, for instance, malaria incidence increased by 337 per cent in 1987. Some 80 per cent of the increase could be explained by changes in rainfall and rising temperatures. Further, small changes in temperatures and precipitation could trigger malaria epidemics beyond current altitudinal and latitudinal disease limits. Global warming will increase the incidence of floods, warming and drought, all of which are factors in disease transmission. In South Africa, it is estimated that the area suitable for malaria will double and that 7.2 million people will be at risk. Greater climatic variability will introduce the disease to areas previously free of malaria. Populations within these areas lack immunity, which will increase the impact of illness (Zhou et al. 2004).

Pastoralist communities are the most vulnerable to climate change. This is because they tend to be located in geographically vulnerable areas such as flood-prone Mozambique, drought-prone Sudan, or cyclone-prone Bangladesh, and in more vulnerable urban locations such as slums and informal settlements, in all cases heavily dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods (Jennings and McGrath 2009).

Vulnerability to climate change is not just a function of geography and dependence on natural resources, it also has social, economic and political dimensions which influence how climate change affects different groups (Leal Filho 2011). Pastoralist communities rarely have insurance to cover loss of property due to drought, storms or cyclones. They cannot pay for the health care required when climate change induced outbreaks of malaria and other diseases occur. They have few alternative livelihood options when their only cow drowns in a flood, or drought kills their maize crop for the year, and they do not have the political clout to ask why their country’s early warning system did not warn them of likely flooding. Climate change will also have psychological and cultural effects. For example, beliefs and traditions associated with the seasons being undermined by climate change.

Therefore, climate change interlocks with people’s life-worlds differently for different reasons. The geographical location of a community may position it in harm’s way when climate change ramifications roll out. The magnitude and impact of the resulting harm may be small or big, depending on where the affected population is located in the politico-economic landscape of the country. This chapter also examines some of the trends on climate change adaptation mechanisms and practice, and their prospects.

Overview of the African Climate Systems

The complexity of the African Climate Systems

The climate systems of Africa, as in other continents, vary from intraseasonal to millennial timescales and beyond. The systems are inherently complex and primarily owe their dynamical existence to competing, interactive processes at the local, regional, and global scales that exert impactful force on the spatio-temporal characteristics of the climates. These processes emanate from eclectic sources, ranging from quasi-stationary orographic forcing (such as Mt. Kilimanjaro in Eastern Africa and the Atlas-Ahaggar Mountain Complex (A-AMC) in Northern Africa), a landmass that houses the world’s largest terrestrial desert (the Sahara Desert) and other deserts (such as the Kalahari and the Namib Deserts), several ocean/atmosphere modes internal to the climate systems, to a vast distribution of limnological systems (Janowiak 1988, Marshall et al. 2001; Chang et al. 2006). Other modulating agents include complex aerosol-radiative forcing/feedback, vegetation dynamics/feedbacks, and land surface forcing, including horizontal distribution of soil moisture and albedo. Continuous anthropogenic perturbations to the built environment, over-exploitation of the continent’s natural resources, unabated use of outdated technology, etc., which directly or indirectly reinforce the negative tendencies of greenhouse gas radiative forcing on the climates, cannot be overstated. These interactive factors substantially and differentially, influence the micro-, meso-, and synoptic-scale climate dynamics of any climatic setting over the continent. There is substantial evidence of climate-driven ecological, environmental, socio-economic impacts, as well as human conflicts, on a region, the negative consequences of which require strategic, remedial actions in the face of climate change. For instance, climate-induced human conflicts have been documented (Hsiang et al. 2013).

Naturally, the differences in geographical locations of the regions in a vast continent also contribute to their inherent but unique complexities and vulnerabilities to climate variability and change. Eltahir and Gong (1996) have presented the governing equations to demonstrate that West Africa is relatively more vulnerable to regional and global environmental change in comparison to other tropical regional climates. Several hypotheses and/or theories were propounded to explain the sensitivity, especially of the West African Sahel, to local, regional, and global forcings. Among these, was the eminent theory by Charney (1975), which was, however, challenged by critics on some grounds (Tucker et al. 1991; Eltahir and Gong 1996). Asnani (2005) has presented a treatise on climate variability and climatological features over the continent. These, together with a plethora of other scholarly research, testify that there appears to be a lack of unified theory which can fully explain the dynamical complexities across the African climate systems as a whole (e.g. Piexoto and Oort 1993; Asnani 2005). A modest appreciation of the climate systems is realized via regional climate studies, which have employed empirical and numerical (dynamical) models, including several downscaling techniques to deal with coarse resolutions of General Circulation Model outputs. Undeniably, the upsurge of dynamical models has improved our understanding of the geophysical mechanisms associated with each regional climate. Nonetheless, such models are imperfect, suggesting that our understanding of the continent’s climates is far from perfect, especially for the nonlinear components of the climate systems.

Recently, applications of Computer Science disciplines, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning or data mining, to climate data have become a complementary path to unraveling the regional climate variability, predictability and prediction and the associated stochasticities (Pendse et al.; Chen et al. 2013; Gonzalez et al. 2015). Mainstream climate scientists have acknowledged these potentials and there is telling evidence of Computer Science–Climate Science five-year (2010–2015) Expedition collaborative research outcomes. The $10 m (US) project was sponsored by the USA National Science Foundation on the theme: ‘Expedition in Computing. Understanding Climate Change – A Data-Driven Approach’ (2015). The project, leaving exemplary footprints in the climate science community, deserves to be mentioned.

Over the geopolitical boundaries of the continent, the following regional climate systems may be distinguished on the basis of their unique climatological features: (i) Northern African Climate System (NACS), (ii) West African Climate System (WACS), (iii) Eastern African Climate System (EACS), (iv) Southern African Climate System (SACS), and Central African Climate System (CACS). However, it should be emphasized that climate knows no political boundaries because teleconnection and transboundary fluxes may have several ramifications which can preferentially influence specific regional climate systems or the continent as a whole. The differential influences from a set of complex, interactive processes are determinants of different rainfall patterns, one of the key economic drivers of the continent, as well as important atmospheric features monitored and evaluated in climate change projections. The next section summarizes the key rainfall features over the regional climate systems.

Regional climates

NACS

The NACS is essentially a desert environment, with complex climate dynamics. Some of the key features intrinsic in a desert are as follows: (i) a major heat source, (ii) lack of moisture and vegetated lands, (iii) lower cloud cover, (iv) dry dynamics – notably subsidence, which is part of the descending branch of the tropical Hadley circulation, (v) heat lows of large amplitudes, (vi) mineral aerosols – in an atmosphere with such dust-laden cloud condensation nuclei which aggressively suppress the growth of rain particles, and (vii) high albedo, among other factors (Rodwell et al. 1996; Asnani 2005; Chauvin et al. 2010).

Different classification systems may be used to describe deserts which, some with key features, will be briefly highlighted here. According to Köppen’s sy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: the interface of climate change and food security
• PART I Trends in climate change in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean
• PART II Rural livelihoods and adaptive responses to climate change
• PART III Urban food systems and governance in the context of climate change
• PART IV Strengthening resilience for enhancing food security in the context of climate change
• Index