Feeling the heat? Protecting subsistence farmers from the worst impacts of climate change.

The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in 2007, leaves no doubt that the Earth's climate is changing, largely as a result of human activity. The last 60 years were the warmest in the last 1000 years. Rainfall patterns are changing. Both floods and droughts are becoming more frequent, and more severe. The impacts will be felt worldwide, but nowhere more acutely than in the world's drylands. Drylands will face not only higher temperatures, but more importantly, disruptions to their hydrological cycles resulting in lower and more erratic rainfall, exacerbating already critical levels of water scarcity and fanning conflicts over water allocation. For example, Mediterranean Africa is likely to lose up to 20% of its current water supplies by the year 2100, with hotter summers, lower rainfall, and increased likelihood of summer droughts.

Payment for environmental services from rangelands Rangelands occupy over two-thirds of the world's drylands (828 million hectares in WANA alone). They are used mainly by poor migrant pastoralists, but they provide vital environmental services to millions of people outside the rangelands – nutrient cycling, water purification and supply regulation, pollution filtration, carbon sequestration, biodiversity protection, erosion control. Pastoralists will be hit hard by climate change. More droughts and less vegetation will lead to changes in the patterns of animal movements and probably accelerate rangeland degradation, reducing the capacity of rangeland systems to provide environmental services. One solution – payment for environmental services. Recipients of these services, or agencies acting on their behalf, pay pastoralists to conserve the rangelands, and thus maintain environmental services. ICARDA has initiated a study that will examine the feasibility of this concept, implementation problems (e.g. who pays whom, and how), and how to put a value on environmental services.

The rural poor in dry areas will require a range of strategies to cope with climate change. These strategies will include new crops and varieties with better drought and heat tolerance; switching from cereal-based to cereal-legume systems; more diverse farming systems that produce higher value outputs; more efficient use of water; and conservation agriculture methods to reduce soil erosion. New pest management methods will be required as changes in climate cause changes in the geographic distribution and spread of disease vectors. Another challenge is to 'intrapolate' global climate models to national or even sub-national scale, to provide early warnings and risk estimates of droughts or floods.

Adaptation plus mitigation

For agriculture, solutions to climate change involve two aspects: adaptation (how to maintain production under the changed conditions) and mitigation (how to soften the impacts on the most vulnerable communities). ICARDA's research contributes to both aspects. The table provides an outline of how our work relates to climate change. Other articles in this issue describe some of the results already achieved, and lessons learnt for the future.

Clearly, better adaptation will require new technologies. But technology alone isn't enough. To reduce vulnerability to climate change, we need to tailor development efforts to local conditions, with a clear understanding of the social and economic factors (property rights, markets, local institutions etc) that determine land use practices. ICARDA scientists have studied these factors in different countries for many years, and the results will help develop strategies that are practical and relevant to poor dryland communities.

Click to enlarge

How can ICARDA help?

Some climate change is inevitable. Can we find ways to help the most vulnerable communities adapt to or cope with the impacts? To do this, we first need to:

• Two-thirds of the world’s dry areas are occupied by rangelands; and more than half of these rangelands are degraded.

  Assess current conditions (e.g. land use, vegetation cover) and where possible, measure how these have changed over time, using remote sensing and ground truthing.
• Better understand the interplay of climatic and socio-economic factors that cause productivity loss and land degradation.
• Assess the risks of climate variability and long-term changes using seasonal and longer-term forecasting linked to agricultural activities and insurance schemes for the rural poor.
• Develop legal and policy frameworks and incentives to support development efforts that link land degradation with climate change adaptation.
• Develop low-cost tools to monitor, evaluate and model land degradation and environmental services. These tools will help land users and policy makers make decisions, and assist regulatory agencies monitor compliance (soil organic matter, carbon sequestration and water quality)
.
• Build the capacity of communities to adapt to climate risk and reduce land degradation, by linking them with agencies that provide meteorological, hydrological and agricultural services.

Several of ICARDA's current research projects relate to climate change and variability. These projects focus on technological, marketing, policy and institutional options for adaptation and mitigation, drawing on results from the Center's work for 30 years in dryland areas on four continents.

Severe gully erosion, caused by loss of vegetation and uncontrolled runoff. Degradation, already a worldwide problem, could increase dramatically in the next two decades.

Other projects, now being planned, will:

• Help make climate change information more relevant and usable for land users and decision makers.
• Develop climate risk screening tools to help identify which areas are most vulnerable, and how to integrate climate change adaptation into land planning, infrastructure design (e.g. optimizing water capture for a given set of conditions) and agricultural policy.
  

Perhaps ICARDA's biggest strengths, given the scale and interconnectedness of climate change issues, are its international presence and strong relationships with national research centers and development agencies throughout the world's dry areas. For example, ICARDA can play a key role in sharing best practices, coordinating multi-country, multi-institution programs, and acting as a bridge between local, regional, national and international efforts, in order to assist national agencies develop and implement action programs on climate change.

Focusing on drylands

Small-scale farmers in marginal areas are already struggling. Climate change could force millions off their land.

Drylands have long been neglected by policy makers because they were misperceived as being degraded marginal areas, offering poor returns on development investment. But they are now attracting growing interest from politicians and policy makers, for various reasons – their sheer size (41% of the world's land area), their importance to development objectives (poverty reduction is a key UN Millennium Development Goal; and according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, poverty is greatest in dryland populations), their role in food security (drylands produce the bulk of national food supplies in many countries), and finally their vast potential to sequester carbon, mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and make ecosystems more resilient to further climate shocks.

ICARDA and its partners are building on decades of successful research to help dryland communities not only realize their agricultural potential, but also contribute to global efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change.