Climate resilience in rural Zambia: evaluating farmers’ response to El Niño-induced drought

Abstract

This paper aims at identifying whether and how sustainable land management practices and livelihood diversification strategies have contributed to moderating the impacts of the El Niño-related drought in Zambia. This is done using a specifically designed survey called the El Niño Impact Assessment Survey, which is combined with the Rural Agricultural Livelihoods Surveys, as well as high resolution rainfall data at the ward level over 34 years. This unique panel data set allows us to control for the time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity to understand the impacts of shocks like El Niño, which are expected to become more frequent and severe as a result of climate change. We find that maize yields were substantially reduced and that household incomes were only partially protected from the shock thanks to diversification strategies. Mechanical erosion control measures and livestock diversification emerge as the only strategies that provided yield and income benefits under weather shock.

Describing complex interactions of social-ecological systems for tipping point assessments: an analytical framework

“…Several driving forces affect the profitability of livelihood strategies. Examples are agricultural technologies (Angelsen and Kaimowitz, 2001), levels of natural resource use (Coomes et al, 2004), historical conditions (Coomes et al, 2016), soil fertility (Heger et al, 2020) and the availability of other ecosystem services (Junqueira et al, 2016), environmental variability (Börner et al, 2015b;Ajefu et al, 2020;Alfani et al, 2021;Girard et al, 2021), farm/forest output level (i.e., productivity) (Klemick, 2011), market prices (e.g., the decline in Brazil nut retail prices) (Ubiali and Alexiades, 2022), and institutional constraints (e.g., land tenure insecurity, encroaching) (Tseng et al, 2021).…”

Introduction: special issue on weather and climate impacts in developing countries

“…In contrast, there is little evidence showing that the adoption of current sustainable land management practices occurs due to the risk of weather shocks. Similarly, Alfani et al (2021) show the limited impact of adaptation strategies to cope with the El-Nino related drought in Zambia and its impact on maize yields. Nshakira-Rukundo et al (2021) review the factors affecting the low uptake of insurance against these shocks by households.…”

Job Displacement and Reallocation Failure: Evidence from Climate Shocks in Morocco

“…Crop and local labor diversification also constitute two well-known adaptation strategies in rural areas. However, while crop diversification is often adopted as an ex ante practice (Asfaw et al, 2018;Alfani et al, 2021;Aragón et al, 2021), labor diversification represents an ex post coping strategy used to face unexpected and severe climatic events such as droughts or floods. By and large, a negative shock in agricultural productivity is expected to drive farmers to allocate more time to economic sectors that are less climate-sensitive, generating an agricultural job displacement that may be associated with a local rural-to-urban migration (for a recent review of this phenomenon, see Cattaneo et al (2020)).…”