Locating Climate Insecurity: Where Are the Most Vulnerable Places in Africa?

Busby, Joshua W.; Smith, Todd G.; White, Kaiba L.; Strange, Shawn M.

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-28626-1_23

Cited by 40 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Here, we use resilience to mean the ability of a social unit, in this case the household unit, to adapt to environmental change and cope with external and internal shocks. Conversely, vulnerability is interpreted as susceptibility to shocks and reduced adaptive capacity (Busby et al 2010). …”

Section: Vulnerability and Resiliencementioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Household Connectivity and Resilience in Marginal Rural Communities through Social Network Analysis in the Village of Habu, Botswana

Cassidy¹,

Barnes²

2012

E&S

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ABSTRACT. Adaptability is emerging as a key issue not only in the climate change debate but in the general area of sustainable development. In this context, we examine the link between household resilience and connectivity in a rural community in Botswana. We see resilience and vulnerability as the positive and negative dimensions of adaptability. Poor, marginal rural communities confronted with the vagaries of climate change, will need to become more resilient if they are to survive and thrive. We define resilience as the capacity of a social-ecological system to cope with shocks such as droughts or economic crises without changing its fundamental identity. We make use of three different indices of household resilience: livelihood diversity, wealth, and a comprehensive resilience index based on a combination of human, financial, physical, social, and natural capital. Then, we measure the social connectivity of households through a whole network approach in social network analysis, using two measures of network centrality (degree centrality and betweenness). We hypothesize that households with greater social connectivity have greater resilience, and analyze a community in rural Botswana to uncover how different households make use of social networks to deal with shocks such as human illness and death, crop damage, and livestock disease. We surveyed the entire community of Habu using a structured questionnaire that focused on livelihood strategies and social networks. We found that gender, age of household head, and household size were positively correlated with social connectivity. Our analysis indicates that those households that are more socially networked are likely to have a wider range of livelihood strategies, greater levels of other forms of social capital, and greater overall capital. Therefore, they are more resilient.

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Section: Vulnerability and Resiliencementioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Household Connectivity and Resilience in Marginal Rural Communities through Social Network Analysis in the Village of Habu, Botswana

Cassidy¹,

Barnes²

2012

E&S

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“…Similar to other parts of Africa, the research countries are considered to have a high level of social vulnerability to the direct effects of climate change because of many factors, such as level of poverty and the level of corruption (Adger and Vincent 2005;Busby et al 2010). As conflictaffected developing countries with a history of poor governance, both CAR and DRC have specific challenges in enhancing their capacity to adapt to climate change.…”

Section: Enhancing Adaptive Capacitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Engle and Lemos (2010) also emphasize that adaptive capacity increases with the increasing networking and connectivity between groups and stakeholders involved in management processes. However, in situations of conflict, such interactions can be limited (Busby et al 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate Change and Forest Communities: Prospects for Building Institutional Adaptive Capacity in the Congo Basin Forests

Brown

Smit

Somorin

et al. 2014

AMBIO

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Tropical forests are vulnerable to climatechange representing a risk for indigenous peoples and forest-dependent communities. Mechanisms to conserve the forest, such as REDD?, could assist in the mitigation of climate change, reduce vulnerability, and enable people to adapt. Ninety-eight interviews were conducted in three countries containing the Congo Basin forest, Cameroon, CAR, and DRC, to investigate perceptions of decisionmakers within, and responses of the institutions of the state, private sector, and civil society to the challenges of climate change. Results indicate that while decision-makers' awareness of climate change is high, direct institutional action is at an early stage. Adaptive capacity is currently low, but it could be enhanced with further development of institutional linkages and increased coordination of multilevel responses across all institutions and with local people. It is important to build networks with forest-dependent stakeholders at the local level, who can contribute knowledge that will build overall institutional adaptive capacity.

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“…When attention turns to environmental factors, those that receive attention are often geographic (such as being land-locked or resource poor [16,17]). Other studies, however, also look to environmental factors such as susceptibility to climate change [18].…”

Section: The Character Of Global Environmental Challenges and Potentimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We may in fact be seeing an increasing trend in conflict between more fundamentalist groupings (with origins in all forms of religion) and more secular humans, as well as across the adherents to competing definitive truths. The Base Case of IFs does not explicitly build levels of domestic and international conflict on assumptions of increasing or decreasing religious, ideological tensions, or environmental constraints (on the link between the environment and conflict, see Homer-Dixon 1999 [27]; Raleigh and Urdal 2007 [28]; Busby, Smith, White and Strange 2010 [18]). The drivers often interact and the complexity of sorting them out suggests the importance of having alternative scenario assumptions.…”

Section: The Character Of Global Environmental Challenges and Potentimentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring Future Impacts of Environmental Constraints on Human Development

et al. 2012

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Environmental constraints have always had, and will always have, important consequences for human development. They have sometimes contributed to, or even caused, the reversal of such development. The possibility that such constraints, including climate change, will grow significantly this century raises the concern that the very significant advances in human development across most of the world in recent decades will slow or even reverse. We use the International Futures (IFs) integrated forecasting system to explore three scenarios: a Base Case scenario, an Environmental Challenge scenario, and an Environmental Disaster scenario. Our purpose is to consider the impact of different aspects and levels of environmental constraint on the course of future human development. Using the Human Development Index (HDI) and its separate components as our key measures of development, we find that environmental constraints could indeed greatly slow progress and even, in disastrous conditions, begin to reverse it. Least developed countries are most vulnerable in relative terms, while middle-income countries can suffer the greatest absolute impact of constraints, and more developed countries are most resilient. Education's advance is the aspect of development tapped by the HDI that is most likely to continue even in the face of tightening environmental constraints, and that is one reason why human development shows great momentum even in the face of environmental challenges. OPEN ACCESSSustainability 2012, 4 959

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Locating Climate Insecurity: Where Are the Most Vulnerable Places in Africa?

Cited by 40 publications

References 37 publications

Understanding Household Connectivity and Resilience in Marginal Rural Communities through Social Network Analysis in the Village of Habu, Botswana

Understanding Household Connectivity and Resilience in Marginal Rural Communities through Social Network Analysis in the Village of Habu, Botswana

Climate Change and Forest Communities: Prospects for Building Institutional Adaptive Capacity in the Congo Basin Forests

Exploring Future Impacts of Environmental Constraints on Human Development

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