Farmers, food and climate change: ensuring community-based adaptation is mainstreamed into agricultural programmes

Abstract

Climate change creates widespread risks for food production. As climate impacts are often locally specific, it is imperative that large-scale initiatives to support smallholder farmers consider local priorities and integrate lessons from successful autonomous adaptation efforts. This article explores how large-scale programmes for smallholder adaptation to climate change might link effectively with community-led adaptation initiatives. Drawing on experiences in Bangladesh, Mozambique, Uganda and India, this article identifies key success factors and barriers for considering local priorities, capacities and lessons in large-scale adaptation programmes. It highlights the key roles of extension services and farmers' organizations as mechanisms for linking between national-level and community-level adaptation, and a range of other success factors which include participative and locally driven vulnerability assessments, tailoring of adaptation technologies to local contexts, mapping local institutions and working in partnership across institutions. Barriers include weak governance, gaps in the regulatory and policy environment, high opportunity costs, low literacy and underdeveloped markets. The article concludes that mainstreaming climate adaptation into large-scale agricultural initiatives requires not only integration of lessons from community-based adaptation, but also the building of inclusive governance to ensure smallholders can engage with those policies and processes affecting their vulnerability.

Mainstreaming Ecosystem Services Based Climate Change Adaptation (EbA) in Bangladesh: Status, Challenges and Opportunities

“…Firstly, climate change adaptation in Bangladesh is overwhelmingly viewed as a structural and technical approach ignoring its socio-cultural attachments with human and nature [46,78]. As a result, EbA approaches are still an underappreciated measure throughout the decision making stages.…”

“…Mainstreaming in this context can broadly be defined as the inclusion of EbA considerations into development and climate policies and practices to influence the dominant paradigm for bringing transformative changes [44][45][46]. Mainstreaming EbA into policy promotes integrated approach to climate change impacts and can robustly address both the climatic extreme events and sustainability issues [47].…”

Climate change and variability impacts on agricultural production and livelihood systems in Western Tanzania

“…Climate change creates widespread risks for food production (Wright et al, 2014). Adaptation of the agricultural sector to the adverse effects of climate change is thus an important priority to protect and improve the livelihoods of the poor and to ensure food security (Asfaw et al, 2014).…”

“…This information is crucial in order to understand, modify or evaluate the performance of local livelihood systems, or to help develop interventions that better suits the local needs. Wright et al (2014) argue that since climate impacts are often location specific, it is imperative that initiatives to support smallholder farmers consider local priorities and integrate lessons from successful autonomous adaptation efforts. At the national level, the magnitude of the problems related to climate change and variability, and hence the vulnerabilities and adaptation needs vary with agro-ecological zones.…”

The Sustainability of Rice-Based Cropping Systems in Coastal Bangladesh: Bio-Economic Analysis of Current and Future Climate Scenarios

“…In particular, paying attention to successful autonomous adaptation options is essential to initiating any large-scale support for smallholder farmers (Wrighta et al 2014). This local understanding can also be used as a basis for assessing future adaptive options for farmers based on the best available projections of crop performance under expected climatic and environmental conditions.…”