The effects of climate change on people’s livelihoods are perceived differently across various localities. It is imperative to examine how farmers understand the effects of climate change on their livelihoods. Their viewpoints can help create strategies for responding to climate and ecosystem changes in an appropriate and practical manner. Such perceptions are insufficiently understood in theWa West District of the Upper West Region of Ghana, despite the increasing frequency and magnitude of climate change’s effects. This paper first examines farmers’ perceptions about climate change in their communities in relation to available, conventional climate information. It also assesses farmers’ livelihood activities during both the wet and dry seasons in the district and discusses the area’s proneness to floods, droughts, and other types of climate change phenomena. This assessment reveals the challenges faced by the farmers in the study area and the opportunities to enhance their livelihoods.
This study seeks to explore stakeholders’ perceptions, causes, and effects of extreme climatic events, such as droughts and floods, in the Wa West District of Ghana’s Upper West Region. A multi-stage sampling procedure is used to select 184 respondents. Data collection methods include individual questionnaire administration, focus group discussions, and a stakeholders’ forum in the Wa West District Assembly. While frequencies are used to show respondents’ perceptions of the severity of climate change effects, a treatmenteffect model is used to determine the factors influencing farmers’ choices of on-farm coping strategies over off-farm activities in both periods of drought and flood. Findings are the following: farmers perceive that climate change is real and has severe consequences. Consequently, they resort to both on-farm and off-farm strategies to cope with the effects of climate change. While men mostly adopt the former, women adopt the latter. Both strategies are, however, not viable for taking them out of poverty, though offfarm activities are more effective. Education and extension services are other important factors influencing the choice of coping strategies as well as farmers’ welfare. Farmers must be supported with more viable income-earning activities, ones that can take them out of poverty. Women should be given priority. Access to education and extension services must also be stepped up to facilitate the adoption of the coping strategies and to increase welfare.
This article aims to explore the relationship between individual adaptive actions and enhancement of community resilience to climate change as a communal objective. It proposes to pay attention to the concept of reflexivity as the primary individual capacity to link adaptive actions and community resilience. Drawing on the field research conducted in northern Ghana in 2015, this article specifically examines life histories of four small farmers and shows that they individually take adaptive actions and reflect on these actions. However, little opportunity exists for them to systematically communicate the reflections with others to learn from their experiences, nurture collective agency and enhance community resilience. The article concludes by outlining new strategies needed to facilitate the communication in particular cultural and policy contexts.
Faced with adversarial climatic and physical conditions and an inept socioeconomic development priorities, Northern Ghana remains one of the regions that are most vulnerable to climate-related shocks and disturbances in semi-arid Africa. Because of the effect of frequent floods, droughts, and bushfires, entire livelihoods in Ghana's predominantly smallholder agricultural population are under threat. In this paper, we present a model for community-based resilience assessment. This model was developed through an experiment conducted in selected rural communities in the Tolon and Wa West Districts in the Northern and Upper West Regions of Ghana. This experiment underpinned an ongoing five-year collaborative research project, Climate and Ecosystem Change Adaptation and Resilience Research in Semi-Arid Africa: AnIntegrated Approach (CECAR-Africa), and involved researchers and scientists from institutions in Ghana and Japan. Drawing on the findings from extensive literature review, field surveys, focus group discussions, unstructured interviews with various stakeholders, and participatory observations, we developed a matrix for assessing the different categories of community 1 United Nations University-Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS), Tokyo, Japan 2 University for Development Studies, Wa and Tamale, Ghana. 3 University of Ghana, Department of Geography and Resource Development, Legon, Accra, Ghana 4 United Nations University-Institute for Natural Resource in Africa (UNU-INRA), Accra, Ghana 5 Ghana Meteorological Agency, Accra, Ghana. 6 The University of Tokyo, Todai Institute for Advanced Study, Integrated Research System for Sustainability Science (IR3S), Tokyo, Japan. resilience (ecological, engineering, and socioeconomic). The outcome of this resilience matrix, herein called an "integrated" assessment model, offers a mix of factors that could improve societal reorganization when faced with shocks or disturbances. The integrated model provides a workable assessment criteria and key indicators for community level resilience assessments. This experiment proved valuable and highly effective in selecting case study communities for CECAR-Africa. The next step will involve the testing and development of similar criteria and indicators to measure household level resilience.
This paper examines the effects of agricultural research expenditure and climate change on agricultural productivity growth by region in Ghana. A panel dataset is constructed for 2000-2009 from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Ghana; and the Agriculture Science and Technology Indicators (ASTI) database of the International Food Policy Research Institute. A Malmquist index was used to compute agricultural productivity growth, including decomposition components efficiency change and technical change. The determinants of productivity growth are examined using a fixed effects regression model. The results specify that significant causal factors impact positively on Ghana’s agricultural productivity growth, include climate variability, infrastructure, and agricultural research and development expenditure. The study confirms there is a need to strengthen and develop new technological progress for sustainable agricultural production in Ghana.
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