Environmental change, adaptation strategies and the relevance of migration in Sub-Saharan drylands

Abstract

Understanding coping and adaptation behaviour of different population groups in the context of global environmental change has become increasingly important, especially in regions with high vulnerability such as Sub-Saharan drylands. In this regard, household strategies tend to be dependent on local and context-specific conditions. However, the strategic development of climate change adaptation measures, as well as natural resource and migration management on national and international level require transferable results and recommendations. In this paper, a first attempt is made to address the lack of meta-knowledge and to create a bigger trans-regional picture on the topic. It provides an exploratory and systematic synthesis of quantitative and qualitative data from 63 studies covering more than 9700 rural households from Sub-Saharan African drylands. Relevant household coping and adaptation strategies under different types of environmental change are assessed with a particular focus on the role and relative significance of migration. The results demonstrate that strategies related to crop, livestock, soil and water management are, by far, the most common. Yet, various forms of migration are reported as strategy by about 23% of the households. Corroborated by qualitative findings, this emphasises the importance of migration for responding to unfavourable environmental conditions at the household level. Based on the synthesised literature, future directions for research needed to support socially and ecologically sustainable coping and adaptation are provided.

Improving Assessments of the Three Pillars of Climate Smart Agriculture: Current Achievements and Ideas for the Future

“…A recent review by Wiederkehr et al (2018) gives an excellent overview of the state of the art in climate change adaptation analyses. One key conclusion of their work is that the concept of adaptation is not well-defined in many studies, with the terms "coping" and "adaptation" being used inter-changeably.…”

“…We will also explore "long term adaptation" due to the gradually changing climate, e.g., by changing cropping systems, management or use of different crop varieties. A key recommendation by Wiederkehr et al (2018) is that the comparability of many results of local case studies needs to be improved upon to be able to draw meaningful and generalizable conclusions regarding climate change adaption and potential adoption of technologies. "Basic socio-economic characteristics of the study population (age mean/range and sex ratio of the interviewees, ethnic background, economic status of households, e.g., farm size or number of livestock, and number of household members) are known to be important factors influencing the coping and adaptation behavior of households" (citation from Wiederkehr et al, 2018) and not only relevant for the adaptation pillar.…”

“…Often different adaptation options were evaluated in a scenario type of analysis (in the quantitative model type of approaches) and/or in a semi-participatory way through expert panels (e.g., Andrieu et al, 2017;Brandt et al, 2017;Mwongera et al, 2017;Acosta-Alba et al, 2019;Khatri-Chhetri et al, 2019). Besides this scenario evaluation method, there is also a rapidly expanding literature on cross-sectional household survey-based work that analyses the current uptake of CSA adaptation options and the potential uptake of CSA adaptation options under continuing climate and global change (e.g., Wiederkehr et al, 2018). Clearly, few studies interlink these distinct approaches, i.e., by comparing the results of such a model-based scenario analysis with the results of a household survey to assess interest in climate change adaptation options, and the adaptive capacity of households under future scenarios.…”

“…As stressed by Wiederkehr et al (2018), the comparability of many local case study results needs to be improved upon to be able to draw meaningful and generalizable conclusions regarding climate change adaptation. Standardized data collection tools like the Worldbank's Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Survey on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA in short; http:// surveys.worldbank.org/lsms/programs/integrated-surveysagriculture-ISA) and the Rural Household Multiple Indicator Survey (RHoMIS in short; www.rhomis.org; Hammond et al, 2017a) are good examples of these with wide outreach.…”

“…In recent years a series of tools and approaches have been developed to evaluate the "CSA-ness" of specific interventions. Recent reviews however have highlighted the limitations of current work evaluating especially the adaptation and mitigation pillars in the smallholder farming context in LMICs, e.g., Wiederkehr et al (2018), focusing on dryland systems and Richards et al (2018). Wiederkehr et al (2018) highlighted the lack of standard concepts, one of their recommendations was "clear definition of used terminology (e.g., adaptation and coping concepts, migration, agro-pastoralism and pastoralism), especially regarding environmental change and stress, " while the key conclusion by Richards et al (2018) was that "GHG calculators may poorly estimate GHG emissions in tropical developing countries by comparing calculator predictions against measurements from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.…”