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We investigate how smallholder farmers at two sites in Kenya and Tanzania cope with climate stress and how constraints and opportunities shape variations in coping strategies between households and over time during a drought. On the basis of this analysis, we draw out implications for adaptation and adaptive policy. We find that households where an individual was able to specialize in one favoured activity, such as employment or charcoal burning, in the context of overall diversification by the household, were often less vulnerable than households where each individual is engaged in many activities at low intensity. Many households had limited access to the favoured coping options due to a lack of skill, labour and/or capital. This lack of access was compounded by social relations that led to exclusion of certain groups, especially women, from carrying out favoured activities with sufficient intensity. These households instead carried out a multitude of less favoured and frequently complementary activities, such as collecting indigenous fruit. While characterized by suitability to seasonal environmental variations and low demands on time and cash investments, these strategies often yielded marginal returns. Both the marginalization of local niche products and the commercialization of forest resources exemplify processes leading to differential vulnerability. We suggest that vulnerability can usefully be viewed in terms of the interaction of such processes, following the concept of locality. We argue that coping is a distinct component of vulnerability and that understanding the dynamism of coping and vulnerability is critical to developing adaptation measures that support people as active agents.

adaptation, climate change, climate policy, coping, vulnerability, vulnerability indicators,

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Determining the spatial response of the climate system to volcanic forcing is of importance in the development of short-term climate prediction and in the assessment of anthropogenic factors such as global warming. The June 1991 eruption of the Philippine volcano, Mount Pinatubo, provides an important opportunity to test existing understanding and extend previous empirical analyses of the volcanic effect. We identify the spatial climate response to major historic eruptions in the surface air temperature and mean-sea-level pressure record and use this information to assess the impact of the Pinatubo eruption. The Pinatubo eruption clearly generated significant global cooling during the years after the event. The magnitude and timing of the cooling is similar to that associated with previous equatorial eruptions. There is good agreement between the spatial patterns of temperature and circulation anomalies associated with the historic eruptions and those following the Mount Pinatubo event. Evidence of limited higher latitude warming and a major change in the atmospheric circulation is found over the Northern Hemisphere during the first winter after the equatorial eruptions analysed, followed by widespread cooling, but limited change in the atmosphere circulation, during the subsequent 2 years.

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