Climate disturbance impact assessment in West Africa: evidence from field survey and satellite imagery analysis

Abstract

Extreme drought events from climate disturbances are weakening livelihood and limiting agriculture and livestock production in the Sahel region. The lack of relevant information to anticipate coping measures has exacerbated impacts leading to climate adaptation failure in most parts. In this regard, the current research paper has collected important datasets with an objective to assess the impact of extreme drought events on household's livelihoods for better understanding impacts, local people's perception, and the changes on vegetation cover in order to support a robust adaptation strategy to drought. The study conducted a household survey and collected satellite data for comparative analysis. The first survey was conducted in 2013 to collect data from 465 household heads through a structured questionnaire. Supplementary focus group discussions (FGDs) were also conducted in 2018 to collect qualitative information from targeted respondents such as village leaders and members of other key groups including women and youth. Descriptive statistics and correlation coefficient matrix were used to characterize the impact on households' main livelihoods and logistic regression to predict people's perception on pasture depletion over the last 20 years. Satellite data were used to derive spectral vegetation of land covers and unsupervised classification indexes. Both individual survey and focus group discussions identified drought as the main climate constraint which reduced crop production, water and pastures. The logistic analysis revealed that if the respondent's major occupation is livestock, the probability to perceive a depletion of pasture will increase by 28%. Concurrently, the satellite image observation in perfect agreement with the field survey showed 6.78% and 6.01% losses of water surface and vegetation cover respectively between 1986 and 2016 in the study area. These findings showed that logistic regression coupled with satellite information can inform on past and future impacts which are extremely crucial for sound adaptation planning in the Sahel region.

Addressing the long- and short-run effects of climate change on major food crops production in Turkey

“…There is an abundance of evidence on the regional, national, and global scale that environmental problems and climate changes have detrimental effects on agricultural production (Tesfahunegn and Gebru 2019). Also, many studies have confirmed the significant impact of CO 2 emissions on agricultural output (Traore et al 2020). Climate change might have direct (e.g., temperature increase and change in rainfall patterns) and indirect effects (e.g., growth of diseases that cause higher costs and make crop management more difficult) (Qureshi et al 2016;Zaied and Cheikh 2015) on agricultural production.…”

Gender-based variations in the perception of climate change impact, vulnerability and adaptation strategies in the Pra River Basin of Ghana

“…Although climate change is expected to have major impacts on a global scale, the rural population in the tropics is more vulnerable to climate change (IPCC, 2007, 2014). Some of the impacts of climate change include increased morbidity and mortality (Gasparrini et al , 2017), decreased labour productivity and supply, decreased economic output (Wossen et al , 2018), mass migration (Hsiang and Sobel, 2016), lower human capital (Garg et al , 2018), reduced working hours (Masuda et al , 2019) and extreme climate events (IPCC, 2014; Traore et al , 2020).…”

“…Africa has been experiencing extreme climate events and would, therefore, need external support to reduce its possible devastating effects in the future (New et al , 2006; Niang et al , 2014; Traore et al , 2020). Agriculture in Africa uses 65% of the labour force and contributes 32% to the gross domestic product (GDP) of the continent (Chauvin et al , 2012).…”