Understanding climate resilience in Ghanaian cocoa communities – Advancing a biocultural perspective

Hirons, Mark; Boyd, Emily; McDermott, Constance L.; Asare, Richard; Morel, Alexandra; Mason, John; Malhi, Yadvinder; Norris, Ken

doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2018.08.010

Cited by 51 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…Rural Ghana's pluralistic land and tree tenure systems implicitly determine the adaptive capacity of cocoa smallholders by restricting adaptation options. Access to wetlands did improve short-term coping with the 2015-16 drought, but farming on wetlands may compromise the hydrological basin on the wider landscape and thus not bolster long-term adaptive capacity (Hirons et al, 2018a). Thus, while Ghana's climate-threatened cocoa sector requires adaptation, our results suggest that adaptation information alone may not be sufficient and rather poorly-resourced smallholders require support with land tenure issues in order to implement techniques to adequately adapt.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 68%

“…Other studies have suggested that reducing climate vulnerability and bolstering adaptive capacity can only be achieved by reducing poverty and socio-economic inequalities (e.g., Smit and Wandel, 2006;Giller et al, 2009;. Thus, we set out to test these claims in our interviews by examining pertinent (Smit and Pilifosova, 2003;Lemos et al, 2013), locally-identified (Hirons et al, 2018a) socio-economic indicators, including, inter alia: age, gender, land tenure, formal schooling, literacy, and proportion of income from cocoa sales. While agricultural information in our study sites did improve farmers' adaptation to drought, the ability of agricultural information alone to enhance adaptive capacity is limited by socio-economic disadvantages, in particular, gender and lack of formal schooling.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Extreme weather events (including droughts, floods, and changes in temperature and precipitation patterns) and overall increased climate variability within Ghana's cocoa sector pose new and cumulative livelihood risks to the already vulnerable smallholders who cultivate cocoa (Anim- Kwapong and Frimpong, 2004;Boon and Ahenkan, 2012;Codjoe et al, 2013;Läderach et al, 2013;Hirons et al, 2018a). The severe El Niño of 2015 caused a prolonged drought in Ghana during the 2015-16 main cocoa crop (Blaser et al, 2018;Whitfield et al, 2019) which resulted in the lowest cocoa production of the past decades (ICCO, 2016;Abdulai et al, 2018;Beauchamp et al, 2019) meaning many cocoa smallholders failed to sustain their livelihoods (Hirons et al, 2018a;Whitfield et al, 2019). Despite multiple compelling reasons for adaptation, Ghana's cocoa smallholders currently face a disconcerting "adaptation deficit, " that is a gap between needed action and the extent to which action is undertaken to adapt to climate change (Burton, 2004;Galway et al, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Enhancing the adaptive capacity of cocoa smallholders so that they can respond effectively to climatic changes necessitates an understanding of their current preparedness and adaptive capacity (Saito et al, 2018). Since cocoa is a drought-sensitive crop (Carr and Lockwood, 2011), the prolonged drought during the 2015-16 main cocoa crop negatively impacted the livelihoods of Ghanaian cocoa farmers (Abdulai et al, 2018;Hirons et al, 2018a). Although there are an estimated 800,000 smallholders growing cocoa in Ghana (Anim- Kwapong and Frimpong, 2004;Carr and Lockwood, 2011;Friedman, 2015;Dontoh, 2018), how individual cocoa farmers experienced the drought varied, as this paper elucidates.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Agricultural Information's Impact on the Adaptive Capacity of Ghana's Smallholder Cocoa Farmers

Maguire‐Rajpaul

Khatun

Hirons

2020

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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Ghanaian smallholders grow one quarter of the world's cocoa, but climate change, individual extreme weather events, such as droughts, as well as deforestation increasingly threaten cocoa production. Pertinent information could bolster adaptive capacity. However, in Ghana's cocoa sector, relevant agricultural information is not available to all farmers, which can exacerbate power asymmetries. This paper focuses on how (i) agricultural and drought-adaptive information and (ii) socioeconomic characteristics shape a cocoa farmer's adaptive capacity. We conducted our study in the aftermath of 2015-16's prolonged El Niño-induced drought that negatively impacted the livelihoods of cocoa smallholders across Ghana. In 48 semi-structured interviews and 12 focus groups, we asked smallholders how they responded to the drought to decipher how adaptive capacity compares between farmers receiving four different sources of agricultural information, and of diverse socioeconomic status. Overall, agricultural information improved cocoa farmers' adaptive capacity compared to those who received no formal agricultural information. Smallholders detailed adaptive techniques that would be accessible to, and thus replicable by, other poorly-resourced cocoa farmers. Shade tree management and income diversification were identified as pertinent adaptive actions. However, we identified a divergence between exposure to agricultural information and its transformation into substantive adaptive action. Additionally, informal information sharing between smallholders represents an underutilized resource by extension programmes. We found that adaptive capacity is also determined by socioeconomic characteristics: particularly gender, and to a lesser extent formal education level, proximity to asphalt roads, and land tenure. Finally, we present evidence that framing adaptive techniques in relatable terms that resonate with farmers' immediate livelihood concerns could narrow the adaptation deficit prevalent in Ghana's cocoa sector.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 68%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Agricultural Information's Impact on the Adaptive Capacity of Ghana's Smallholder Cocoa Farmers

Maguire‐Rajpaul

Khatun

Hirons

2020

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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“…For example, an important adaptive strategy noted in PNG was reliance on social agency and tribal links, an important cultural aspect that was not necessarily considered in other projects. Similarly, the importance of beliefs and worldviews is highlighted in the ECOLI-MITS project (Hirons et al 2018). Discussion with project teams around the conceptual framework (figure 1) suggested these factors were recognized as important but generally treated qualitatively, and data were not collected at the household-level across all projects.…”

Section: Aggregation Of Resilience Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of quantitative cross-case analysis in understanding tropical smallholder farmers’ adaptive capacity to climate shocks

Beauchamp

Moskeland

Milner‐Gulland

et al. 2019

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Climate shocks are predicted to increase in magnitude and frequency as the climate changes, notably impacting poor and vulnerable communities across the Tropics. The urgency to better understand and improve communities' resilience is reflected in international agreements such as the Paris Agreement and the multiplication of adaptation research and action programs. In turn, the need for collecting and communicating evidence on the climate resilience of communities has increasingly drawn questions concerning how to assess resilience. While empirical case studies are often used to delve into the context-specific nature of resilience, synthesizing results is essential to produce generalizable findings at the scale at which policies are designed. Yet datasets, methods and modalities that enable cross-case analyses that draw from individual local studies are still rare in climate resilience literature. We use empirical case studies on the impacts of El Niño on smallholder households from five countries to test the application of quantitative data aggregation for policy recommendation. We standardized data into an aggregated dataset to explore how key demographic factors affected the impact of climate shocks, modeled as crop loss. We find that while cross-study results partially align with the findings from the individual projects and with theory, several challenges associated with quantitative aggregation remain when examining complex, contextual and multi-dimensional concepts such as resilience. We conclude that future exercises synthesizing cross-site empirical evidence in climate resilience could accelerate research to policy impact by using mixed methods, focusing on specific landscapes or regional scales, and facilitating research through the use of shared frameworks and learning exercises.

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Biocultural approaches to sustainability: A systematic review of the scientific literature

et al. 2020

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Current sustainability challenges demand approaches that acknowledge a plurality of human–nature interactions and worldviews, for which biocultural approaches are considered appropriate and timely. This systematic review analyses the application of biocultural approaches to sustainability in scientific journal articles published between 1990 and 2018 through a mixed methods approach combining qualitative content analysis and quantitative multivariate methods. The study identifies seven distinct biocultural lenses, that is, different ways of understanding and applying biocultural approaches, which to different degrees consider the key aspects of sustainability science—inter‐ and transdisciplinarity, social justice and normativity. The review suggests that biocultural approaches in sustainability science need to move from describing how nature and culture are co‐produced to co‐producing knowledge for sustainability solutions, and in so doing, better account for questions of power, gender and transformations, which has been largely neglected thus far. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

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Understanding climate resilience in Ghanaian cocoa communities – Advancing a biocultural perspective

Cited by 51 publications

References 71 publications

Agricultural Information's Impact on the Adaptive Capacity of Ghana's Smallholder Cocoa Farmers

Agricultural Information's Impact on the Adaptive Capacity of Ghana's Smallholder Cocoa Farmers

The role of quantitative cross-case analysis in understanding tropical smallholder farmers’ adaptive capacity to climate shocks

Biocultural approaches to sustainability: A systematic review of the scientific literature

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