CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION PROJECT

Climate change is the change in stable weather conditions of a given place which have been noted in such a place for a period extending over thirty years. It is notable and lasting change in the distribution of weather patterns in over thirty years. Climate affects agricultural production directly. The International Fund for Agricultural Development accepts climate change to be among the factors influencing rural poverty. Climate change affects the globe as a whole but its effects is felt much more by poor people in third world countries because they rely much on natural resources as a source of their livelihoods. Poor rural communities rely much on livestock keeping and agriculture which are climate-sensitive sectors of the economy. We have to adapt and employ mitigation strategies to respond to climate change. Adapting involves reducing the vulnerabilities of ecosystem to climate change whereas mitigation involves reducing the long term impact of climate change. Mitigating also involves reducing the emission of green house gases while adapting will also involves supporting local communities to deal with the impacts of climate.
Agriculture of a given place depends on the climate of such a place; with climate change agriculture is affected negatively. Climate change accelerates the challenges facing the agricultural production and specifically in Sub-Saharan Africa. Innovations are the way to mitigating the effects of climate change on agricultural production. Climate change has lead to reversed weather patterns increased temperatures and unpredictable weather patterns. This has affected the planning of the farmer on when to prepare his field for planting as well as affecting the maturity of certain crops. As a result farmers have had overall losses in agricultural production which has discouraged farmers to continue thus affecting food security. Livestock farmers also have had losses due to inadequate pasture for their animals, most animals have died. If climate change is not contained then food security will be affected.
AGRICULTURAL TECHNOLOGIES FOR CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION AND ADAPTATION
The core challenges to achieve include; i. Providing more food. ii. Providing the food more efficiently. iii. Providing the food under changing production conditions. iv. Making net reduction in green house gases from agricultural food production and marketing of agricultural produce.
Use of new crop traits and varieties
New crop traits and varieties make the use of fertilizer and herbicides less intensive. They increase the productivity. These new crop traits and varieties offer farmers with flexibility to adapting to climate change, some traits have tolerance to various degrees of salinity and also others have short maturation period which shortens the farmers risk to advanced weather conditions. New crop varieties and traits that farmers have traditionally cultivated will confer sufficient scope of adaptation. Temperature changes could speed disease and pest growth and change their population and ability to resist to pesticides. Resistant crop varieties and traits will increase the farmer`s ability to adapt to climate change. The extent to which these crop varieties require less pesticides they reduce carbon emission by decreasing pesticide demand and the number of in-field applications. In March 2008, Monsanto announced a public-private initiative to develop drought-resistant maize varieties for Africa. At times of moderate drought, the new traits are expected to increase productivity by 25-34 per cent. Genetically modified crops have led to reductions in green house gases emissions reducing demand for cultivated land and fuel-based inputs. These reductions are direct in the case of Bacillus thuringiensis crops, which require reduced pesticide sprays.
Management of water and irrigation
There increasing environmental demands for water which requires agriculture to embrace water use efficiency. Due to hot temperatures and unpredictable precipitation taking control of water sources will play a big role towards enhancing water use efficiency in agriculture. Climate change burdens currently irrigated areas and it outstrips current irrigation capacity due to water shortages. Areas with limited irrigation, timely ‘deficit irrigation’ can bring a notable difference in agricultural productivity. With reducing water supplies, the given deficit irrigation techniques will become important. In areas where irrigation is not carried out, water conservation and water harvesting techniques may be farmers’ only alternative to abandoning cultivation agriculture all together. This is practical in the drier parts of Kenya especially in Makueni and Kitui counties where there is great variability in the amount of rainfall received year after year.

Other production inputs

Improvements in crop yields per unit of land are crucial as an alternative to extensive conversion of grassland and forestland to crops. Therefore technologies with potential to increase the intensity of land use can lead to mitigation benefits. There are amendments such as biochar, a charcoal soil amendment that may offer both improved soil fertility and serve as a carbon sink (Lehmann, et al., 2006). Similarly, herbicides and other inputs that reduce competition from weeds can improve productivity and thereby serve to mitigate green house gases emissions associated with bringing additional land under cultivation.

Marketing and supply chains

The potential for green house gases mitigation after products leave the farm is also crucial. Transportation is a major contributor of green house gases emissions. Post harvest green house gases emissions per unit of consumption mostly depend on efficiencies of transport as compared to the distance traveled. Improvements in transportation efficiency are therefore as important to reducing agriculture’s green house gases emissions as they are to other sectors of the global economy. Although local food production is currently a fashionable response to the green house gases emissions attributable to shipping food, in many cases the greatest net reduction in green house gases emissions may come from producing crops where they can be grown most efficiently and investing in improved efficiency transport to move the food to consumers. Investments in improved harvesting, processing, storage, distribution, and logistics technology and necessary training investments can pay off as well as improved crop yields in terms of gains to consumers and the climate. As climates become hotter and precipitation more erratic, the potential for postharvest losses may increase and thus improved transport and storage become even more important.

Production management and practices

Production techniques are as important as production technologies in climate change adaptation and mitigation. One such technique stands out in reduced tillage agriculture. This technique aims to build up organic matter in soils and create a healthy soil ecosystem by not tilling the soil before each planting. Seeds are planted using seed drills that insert seeds to a precise depth without disturbing the soil structure. By increasing the organic matter in soils, conservation agriculture improves the moisture capacity of the soil and thereby increases water use efficiency. The practice also reduces carbon emissions by reducing tilling. The key challenge is to assure that production practices do not reduce yields so that the demand for additional land offsets the benefits from on field sequestration.

Information

As farmers and others deal with changes in climate and more variability in weather, past events become less reliable guide. Under these conditions there is greater payoff to improvements to forecasts of weather events and inter-seasonal weather probabilities. For example, warmer ocean temperatures are likely to make el Niño events more frequent and severe. Farmers with foreknowledge of such events can respond by planting more appropriate crops or varieties. Such improved forecasts would also affect planting even in regions unaffected by the weather events in response to price expectations and opportunities for trade. Furthermore, inter-temporal arbitrage in the form of storage or forward contracting would be used to offset changes in expected harvests. Thus major innovations in response to climate variability will take the form of improved information through global monitoring and forecasting (Hallstrom and Sumner, 2000, Sumner, et al., 1998). Improved micro-climate modeling can also enable more accurate interpolations between actual weather stations and, in effect, create virtual weather stations for nearly any location. These improved interpolations could lead to improved short term forecasts, which could be disseminated via SMS using rapidly spreading cell phone networks. Lastly, better and more timely information can also help to forecast impending ‘slow onset’ weather events such as drought more effectively and thereby improve response times and adaptation (Mude, et al., 2009).

Insurance cover

Innovations in microfinance generally and in micro-insurance products specifically may aid farmers’ capacity to adapt to climate change. This is especially true in production settings that are exposed to greater variability and more frequent extreme events. The microfinance movement has significant momentum and will likely continue spreading into poor rural areas. The dramatic expansion of mobile phone networks into rural areas of developing countries and the emergence of SMS-based banking services will only speed farmers’ integration into financial markets. Compared to microfinance, micro-insurance innovation and availability is much more limited although potentially just as important (Barrett, et al., 2007). Beginning in the late 1990s, the World Bank and others began to experiment with weather risk insurance products based on weather or other indices. Presently, there are index insurance pilots and products being launched in many developing countries. Although the impetus for these efforts has primarily come from the public sector development community, private banks and re-insurance firms are actively involved. The challenge is to develop a sustainable insurance system that does not require such a large subsidy that it acts to raise expected incomes rather than as insurance against downside variability. These index insurance products rely on measured weather outcomes and thereby reduce several practical problems associated with traditional production outcome (e.g., yield, livestock mortality) insurance, including adverse selection and moral hazard problems and administration and monitoring costs (Dischel, 2002, Hess, et al., 2002). For example, in arid and semi-arid rain fed systems, a cumulative rainfall index or one based on weekly weights according to the importance of rainfall timing within a growing season (e.g., Stoppa and Hess, 2003) can be highly correlated with production outcomes and therefore offer substantial value to producers if yield variability is a substantial contributor to income variability. In arid pastoral settings, index insurance that protects against severe drought losses will soon be available to East African pastoralists and appears to be promising (Mude, et al., 2009).Delivering the products to smallholders may be especially costly due to administration costs .

Pastoralists and climate change

Pastoralists are people who engage in animal agriculture. They are characterized with moving along with their livestock in such of pasture and water for their livestock. They do so because they live in arid and semi-arid lands which experience variability in the amount of precipitation, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Pastoralists derive their livelihood from livestock-herding. The main climate-related vulnerabilities that have affected pastoralists in Kenya include:

* Successive poor rains: Pastoralism is well adapted to coping with a single rain failure in a particular area, but when successive rainy seasons fail there is insufficient regeneration of grazing land, and pasture shrinks. When pasture shrinks pastoralists loose most of their livestock like the case of what happened in Samburu County in the recent past. * Unpredictable and sometimes heavy rainfall events: These make it difficult to plant and harvest crops (growing numbers of pastoralists plant crops on a small scale) and sometimes are partly responsible for causing flash floods. Floods can damage both crops and infrastructure. This threatens the food security of pastoral communities and can even lead to both human and animal death. * Return rate of drought: Frequent droughts in the recent years have made hard for households rebuild their assets, livestock included. This has lead to chronic food insecurity and magnified poverty among pastoral communities. Reports from the Kenya Food Security Group and from pastoralist communities show that drought-related shocks used to occur every ten years, and they are now occurring every five years or less. A pastoral association in Wajir District in Kenya reported that their animals don’t have time to recover physically from drought and can no longer withstand the dry spells. Cattle begin dying after just two months of a dry spell and are continuously being lost every dry period, whether there is a drought or not.
Dealing with challenge of climate

i. Through increased investment
If pastoral communities are provided with a right kind of investment they may be able to deal with climate change.
Pastoralists should be provided with improved market access and opportunity. This will ensure that pastoralists get the best value for their products. The lack of timely and reliable market information is one the obstacles to profitable marketing of pastoralist livestock. The investments to improve market access and opportunity include:

* Facilitating the provision of business skills to pastoralist women and men to encourage the establishment initiatives such as of dairy co-operatives, tanneries, and leatherwork businesses. * Encouraging alternative economic activity using other appropriate livestock products through awareness rising, skills transfer training, capacity-building, and market linkages. * Improving livestock market infrastructure, auction system, and record keeping.

There should be public-private partnership to include pastoralists in weather – risk insurance products to enable them to cope with impacts of drought and floods. Access to medium- to long-term weather forecast information should be useful for pastoral risk management since accurate predictions could help herders move livestock in a timely fashion. An accurate early-warning system (EWS) is an important part of effective drought and flood mitigation and preparedness.
Governments in the East Africa region also need to join forces to address cross-border issues like conflict and migration, as well as opportunities for cross-border livestock marketing.

ii. Through increased representation
Pastoralists must be empowered to influence policy formulation and implementation at the national level. National and local government must proactively involve them in development initiatives including managing climate change and its impacts
Improved political representation for pastoralists should translate into a clear establishment of their rights. It is of paramount importance that pastoralists secure their land and resource rights with well-defined conditions relating to the quality of use and the provision of a legal framework through which land- and resource-use disputes can be resolved.

iii. Through adaptation

Traditionally pastoralists have had a number of ways to adapting to climate variability and change. These ways include: * Movement and migration: Pastoralists move in search of pasture and water for their livestock. * Herd management: This involves having a diversity of herd, having both grazing and browsing livestock species to maximize the amount of pasture and water. Pastoralists also have a large herd during times of plenty pasture and water to compensate for loss during drought times. They also split the herd into small groups to reduce overgrazing. * Livestock feed supplementation: This is the supplementation livestock grazing with other specifically during drought. * Sharing, loaning and giving of livestock as gifts: This fosters communal living. Sharing of livestock is highest during drought times when some families are hardest hit by the drought and they hardly have livestock for milk and meat purposes.

References http://www.aridland.go.ke/NRM_Strategy/Addendum_EMF.pdf ictsd.org/downloads/2010/06/agn-and-adaptation-in-developing-countries_web.pdf http://www.ke.boell.org/downloads/Kenya_Climate_Change_Adaptation_Preparedness.pdf http://cgspace.cgiar.org/bitstream/handle/10568/3838/KenyaWB_Report3a_FINAL.pdf

http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/publications/impacts.pdf
http://www.kenyafoodsecurity.org/inside.php?articleid=54