Patterns and Perceptions of Climate Change in a Biodiversity Conservation Hotspot

Quantifying local people's perceptions to climate change, and their assessments of which changes matter, is fundamental to addressing the dual challenge of land conservation and poverty alleviation in densely populated tropical regions To develop appropriate policies and responses, it will be important not only to anticipate the nature of expected changes, but also how they are perceived, interpreted and adapted to by local residents. The Albertine Rift region in East Africa is one of the world's most threatened biodiversity hotspots due to dense smallholder agriculture, high levels of land and resource pressures, and habitat loss and conversion. Results of three separate household surveys conducted in the vicinity of Kibale National Park during the late 2000s indicate that farmers are concerned with variable precipitation. Many survey respondents reported that conditions are drier and rainfall timing is becoming less predictable. Analysis of daily rainfall data for the climate normal period 1981 to 2010 indicates that total rainfall both within and across seasons has not changed significantly, although the timing and transitions of seasons has been highly variable. Results of rainfall data analysis also indicate significant changes in the intra-seasonal rainfall distribution, including longer dry periods within rainy seasons, which may contribute to the perceived decrease in rainfall and can compromise food security. Our results highlight the need for fine-scale climate information to assist agro-ecological communities in developing effective adaptive management

Agricultural policy informed by farmers' adaptation experience to climate change in Veneto, Italy

There is an increasing call for agricultural water management to adapt to climate change, yet efforts in this direction often consider only the policy dimension, or planned adaptation perspective. However, it is crucial to include an assessment of farmers’ autonomous adaptation into the design and evaluation of rural policy measures. Amongst others, this helps avoid doubling efforts and ensure the effectiveness of the policies proposed. Moreover, farmers are the primary receivers of climate-proofing agricultural policies. Hence, to maximise a policy’s success, it is fundamental to include farmers in its design phases. Farmers autonomously react to changes and policies should build on ongoing efforts. This work, carried out in the Veneto Region of Italy, proved the advantages of approaching adaptation as a continuum between autonomous and planned, rather than addressing the two separately. We first collected farmers’ perceptions of and adaptations to change through an online questionnaire. We then identified the major determinants of their choice to adapt through a multinomial probit model. We analysed farmers’ expectations of effectiveness of five different adaptation options for water conservation, via an ad-hoc online decision support system tool, mDSSweb. Our work provided policy makers with information on how different typologies of farmers are (not) adapting their practices to climate change. We clearly identified which groups of farmers the policies should target first and with what type of support. Both policy makers and farmers reacted positively to our approach and expressed interest in up-scaling it to become more inclusive