No abstract

Background: It is widely accepted that crop yields will be affected by climate change. However, the role played by climate in affecting crop yields visa -vis non-climatic stresses, is often unclear, limiting decision choices around efforts to promote increased production in light of multiple stresses. Results: This study quantifies the role of climatic and non-climatic factors affecting multiple crop yields in Uganda, utilizing a systematic approach which involves the use of a two-stage multiple linear regression to identify and characterize the most important drivers of crop yield, examine the location of the key drivers, identify the socioeconomic implications of the drivers and identify policy options to enhance agricultural production. We find that non-climatic drivers of crop yields such as forest area dynamics (p = 0.012), wood fuel (p = 0.032) and usage of tractors (0.041) are more important determinants of crop yields than climatic drivers such as precipitation, temperature and CO 2 emissions from forest clearance. Climatic drivers are found to multiply existing risks facing production, the significance of which is determined by variability and inadequate distribution of precipitation over the crop growing seasons. Conclusion: The significance and validity of these results is observed in an f-statistic of 50 for the final optimized model when compared to the initial model with an f-statistic of 19.3. Research and agricultural policies have to be streamlined to include not only the climatic elements but also the non-climatic drivers of global, regional and national agricultural systems.

Efforts to support the building of resilient pastoralism have been stepped up in Uganda through a number of activities. One of the activity is the provision of seasonal and medium-range climate forecasts to enable decisions concerning livestock herding. Seasonal weather forecasts are critical but there are challenges of timeliness and usability of the forecasts. The challenges are associated with the multiplicity of information sources, methods for data integration and dissemination channels. Institutions including public and Civil Society Organizations usually invest in collecting weather and other data which should be accessible. Often times this data remains hoarded necessitating other organizations to collect similar data. The inter-institutional relations notwithstanding, the lack of data sharing leads to minimal data available for open access. This paper illustrates that this challenge can be addressed by using combined multiple methods to elicit data on weather and other biophysical conditions for pastoralism in Karamoja. In this paper we additionally analyse the opportunities and challenges of using multiple sources of pastoral-relevant data to couple with weather information in support of herding decisions. Building resilient pastoralism that utilizes pasture and water availability will have to utilize available data. It is evident that more robust approaches for data sharing at global, regional and local levels are needed to understand how pastoralists can respond to climate shocks and changes. The paper illustrates the use of a multifaceted-methods approach including open data to develop climate forecast information for risk-reduction oriented information for decisionmaking. Integration of this data provides insights on how pastoralists have long adapted to a variable and changing climate, the methods and processes of adaptation to losses and damages from the climate shocks.

In Uganda, the Karamojong Pastoralist and Batwa forest pygmy communities are disproportionately affected by the increasing frequency and magnitude of climate change impacts. Though these communities have long-standing traditional systems to adapt to a changing climate, policymakers and researchers often disregard the adaptations. Programs in the Karamoja region aim to make pastoralism more resilient to climate change, but most ignore pastoralism’s resilience to climate variability and instead focus on changing livestock systems, reducing livestock numbers, adopting crop growing, and diversifying to other economic activities. On the other hand, Batwa forest pygmies have long adapted to climate change in tropical forests by integrating their health systems to the ecosystem. This chapter maps out the policy implications of resilience building in poor communities marginalized by public policy. Gaps, constraints, and opportunities are discussed, in addition to lessons from existing community adaptations that build resilience to climate change.