Climate, crops, and forests: a pan-tropical analysis of household income generation

Abstract

Rural households in developing countries depend on crops, forest extraction and other income sources for their livelihoods, but these livelihood contributions are sensitive to climate change. Combining socioeconomic data from about 8,000 smallholder households across the tropics with gridded precipitation and temperature data, we find that households have the highest crop income at 21°C temperature and 2,000 mm precipitation. Forest incomes increase on both sides of this agricultural maximum. We further find indications that crop income declines in response to weather shocks while forest income increases, suggesting that households may cope by reallocating inputs from agriculture to forests. Forest production may thus be less sensitive than crop production to climatic fluctuations, gaining comparative advantage in extreme climates and under weather anomalies. This suggests that well-managed forests might help poor rural households to cope with and adapt to future climate change.

Understanding Poverty-Environment Relationship from Sustainable Development Perspectives

“…Studies [for e.g. [134,135,136,137,138,139,140,141,142,143,144,145,146,147,148,149,150,151,152,153,154] also show that poor people often have a high level of awareness about the environment, and are in a position to protect the environment, as a sustainable environment will support their livelihoods. Hence, we can say that the 'poverty creates environmental degradation' argument is vastly insufficient for understanding the nature of these processes.…”

How does gendered vulnerability shape the adoption and impact of sustainable livelihood interventions in an era of global climate change?

“…Forests are likely to play an especially important role in promoting household resilience in the coming decades, as climate change increases the risk of crop failure and other household income shocks. Recent empirical evidence suggests that income from forest product collection often increases when temperatures are at extremes, helping to substitute for decreases in crop income associated with non-optimal temperatures (Wunder et al 2018).…”

“…Currently, researchers estimate that rural households in low and middle-income countries earn nearly 70% of their income through a combination of agriculture, the collection of forest products, timber harvesting, and capture fishing or aquaculture . In the near term, climate change is projected to reduce agricultural productivity (Fischer et al 2005), reduce the capacity of forests to support livelihood diversification through timber harvesting and the collection of non-timber forest products (Wunder et al 2018), and influence both the quantity and distribution of fish and other marine resources (Cheung et al 2016). As such, over the last several decades many government agencies and NGOs have begun to explore potential policies and interventions for improving environmental sustainability, or the capacity of the environment to cope with and fully recover from stressors and shocks while maintaining well-being and the natural resource base of those who are dependent on natural resource-based livelihoods (Chambers and Conway 1992).…”

Cross-cutting Issues

“…Recent studies have examined the link between climate change and poverty in developing countries. In general, rural households in developing countries depend on crops, forest extraction and other income sources for their livelihoods, which tend to be extremely sensitive to climate change (Wunder, Noack and Angelsen 2018). The poor are more exposed to extreme climate conditions and experience greater rainfall fluctuations, while the poorest in dry regions experience the greatest forest loss (Angelsen and Dokken 2018).…”