Due to the important role that the agricultural sector plays in sustaining growth and reducing poverty in developing countries, the adoption of practices that have the potential to simultaneously improve agricultural productivity while minimizing environmental impacts is essential. This paper examines the determinants of farmers' perceptions of climate change and subsequent adoption of sustainable land management practices in the Niger basin of Benin. Binary and multivariate probit models are applied in a two-stage regression procedure to cross-sectional data collected through a survey of 545 randomly selected farm households in 28 villages. The findings indicate that there are substitutabilities among three pairs of sustainable land management practices being used by the farmers. Climate change perception is positively related to land tenure, experience in farming, number of relatives, tractor use, and membership in farmers' organizations, and negatively related to household size, remoteness, and plough use. Moreover, the findings reveal that the uptake of land management practices is related to assets, land tenure, education level of the household head, remoteness, social network, non-irrigated land size, having a farm located near a river/lake/stream, tractor and plough use, being a subsistence farmer or not, and memberships in farmers' organizations. The adoption of sustainable land management practices could be encouraged through improving access to markets, adequate roads, and technologies, as well as by promoting membership in farmers' organizations.

This paper investigates the impact of climate change on agriculture in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). To that end, a bio-economic model is built and calibrated on 2004 base year dataset and the potential impact is evaluated on land use and crop production under two representative concentration pathways coupled with three socio-economic scenarios. The findings suggest that land use change may depend on crop types and prevailing future conditions. As of crop production, the results show that paddy rice, oilseeds, sugarcane, cocoa, coffee, and sesame production could experience a decline under both moderate and harsh climate conditions in most cases. Also, doubling crop yields by 2050 could overall mitigate the negative impact of moderate climate change. The magnitude and the direction of the impacts may vary in space and time.

This paper investigates the role of intra-regional trade on food availability within the context of global climatic change in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).To that end, the study uses a module of trade cost minimization built within a bio-economic optimization model of cropland allocation. The results show that the climate-induced trade pattern in ECOWAS depends on the prevailing socio-economic conditions during the century. No specific pattern of trade flows is predicted but several countries may become dependent on food imports outside of ECOWAS. An adjustment of the common external tariffs (CET) may reduce food import costs. Also, doubling crop yields by 2050 could significantly reduce outside dependence. Finally, actions are urgently needed to be taken to foster agricultural production in ECOWAS.

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This paper investigates empirically the choice of cooking fuels and the factors that are associated with the adoption of modern cooking fuels. Exploiting the 2015 Benin Living Standard Measurement Survey data of 19,705 households, a multinomial probit model is estimated to identify the factors that are associated with the adoption of the three categories of cooking fuels (traditional, transition, and modern). Overall, the findings reveal that the most used cooking fuels are traditional in general, that is, firewood (68.28%), followed by transition fuels (27.25%), and modern fuels (4.47%), with disparities across rural and urban areas. The estimation results indicate that having a female household head, having a household head with at least secondary formal education level, per capita expenditures, remittances, access to electricity, and economic shocks are positively associated with the adoption of modern cooking fuels, while not living in the main city of the country hinders their adoption.