September 7, 2012, 1:07 PM 23 Comments

Study Finds Some African Farmers Adapting to Withstand Climate Stresses

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Jehad Nga for The New York TimesDrought can devastate African communities, as was the case innorthern Kenya in 2009 (slide show).

It’s been clear for many years that the stresses that come with extreme climate conditions have an outsize impact on poor communities, and nowhere more so than in sub-Saharan Africa. Given the studies projecting how greenhouse-driven warming will worsen drought and heat in regions that already tend to be dry and hot, it’s encouraging to see signs in one hard-hit African region of farmers’ capacity to shift practices to deal with intensifying climatic stresses.

The new evidence comes in a paper in the journal Food Security, “Are food insecure smallholder households making changes in their farming practices? Evidence from East Africa,” led by researchers at the Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security of the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers, best known as CGIAR. (For another example, see what engineers in Bangladesh have been considering to deal with rising seas.) Here are a couple of highlights as described in a summary:

· 55 percent of households have taken up at least one shorter-cycle crop variety, and 56 percent adopted at least one drought tolerant variety. These practices help farmers work around periods of heat and water scarcity.
· 50 percent of households are planting trees on their farms, a practice known as agroforestry. These trees help stabilize eroding landscapes, increase water and soil quality, and provide yields of fruit, tea, coffee, oil, fodder, medicinal and energy products.
· 50 percent introduced intercropping—alternating different plants in the same plot—and 25 percent started rotating their crops during the last decade. These and other techniques help maintain and improve soil fertility and enhance crop yields.

The study points out, however, that many proven methods for sustaining productivity in the face of drought, are not yet widely employed (one goal of CGIAR is disseminating such optimal practices). Here are some findings described in the release:

· Only 25 percent of households have begun using manure or compost and 23 percent are now mulching. These techniques help improve soil and alleviate the need for more costly practices, such as applying petroleum-based fertilizer.

· 16 percent of the surveyed households have introduced improved soil management techniques such as terracing, building ridges or other techniques that reduce water and soil organic matter losses

· 10 percent have begun trying to store or manage agricultural water. As demands on fresh water resources multiply, farmers need to embrace ways in which they effectively use what they have, for example through rainwater harvesting.

One of the gloomiest, if unsurprising, realities revealed in the study is that farmers struggling to feed themselves have the least capacity to change. One study author, Patti Kristjanson, described the chicken-and-egg conditions that result in such circumstances in a printed statement:

It stands to reason that households struggling to feed their families throughout the year are not in a good position to invest in new practices that include higher costs and risks. Yet not adapting is certainly contributing to food insecurity. Food insecurity means lower adaptive capacity to deal with all kinds of change.

The bottom line, of course, is that while the tougher challenge of pursuing a climate-friendly energy quest is pursued, there’s enormous potential to boost human resilience to climate extremes — whether the result of building greenhouse gases or nature’s built-in shocks — in places that are in harm’s way.

[2:57 p.m. | Updated |Also relevant are efforts by Jennifer Burney and others at Stanford’s Center on Food Security and Environment to map aquifers in Africa’s dry regions and develop cheap, efficient drip irrigation systems. A relevant paper, published in 2010 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is: “Solar-powered drip irrigation enhances food security in the Sudano–Sahel.”]