Representative Agricultural Pathways and Scenarios for Regional Integrated Assessment of Climate Change Impacts, Vulnerability, and Adaptation

The global change research community has recognized that new pathway and scenario concepts are needed to implement impact and vulnerability assessment where precise prediction is not possible, and also that these scenarios need to be logically consistent across local, regional, and global scales (Moss et al., 2008, 2010). For global climate models, representative concentration pathways (RCPs) have been developed that provide a range of time-series of atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations into the future (Moss et al., 2008, 2010; van Vuuren et al., 2012a). For impact and vulnerability assessment, new socio-economic pathway and scenario concepts have also been developed (Kriegler, 2012; van Vuuren et al., 2012b), with leadership from the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium (IAMC)..

Climate Change, Agricultural Production, and Poverty in India

The low-income households in the South Asian countries are highly sensitive to climate-intensive sectors like agriculture, mainly due to the negative impact of climate change on the food production system as a whole. Climate-induced supply shortfalls in agriculture, and consequent food price shocks may adversely affect consumption in these households. The tension between economic development, climate change, and agricultural production offers a challenging research question not dealt with in recent studies for India. We explore the effect of climate change on farmland value and use a counterfactual measure of the farm revenue on rural consumption expenditure. We found a discerning impact of the climate change on the net revenue and well-being of the rural people. A theoretical exercise generalizes the empirical findings

Impact of drought tolerant maize adoption on maize productivity, sales and consumption in rural Zimbabwe

© 2017 Agricultural Economics Association of South Africa. Increased frequency of droughts (especially mid-season dry spells), higher than normal temperatures and altered patterns of precipitation and intensity are some of the extreme weather events evident in southern Africa. These extreme weather events present a threat to livelihoods and sustainability of agricultural production in the region. However, several climate-smart agricultural technologies (including drought-tolerant maize) believed to offer adaptation to climate variability in maize-based farming systems have been widely adopted. Moreover, empirical work on these technologies is limited. This paper demonstrates how by adopting drought-tolerant maize, a climate-smart agricultural technology impacts on the quantities of maize produced, sold and consumed in Zimbabwe. Using primary data on smallholder farmers collected in 2011 in Zimbabwe’s four districts, we employed propensity score matching techniques to construct a suitable comparison group and calculate the average treatment effect on the treated sample. We find that, the adoption of drought-tolerant maize (DTM) in rural Zimbabwe significantly enhances overall maize productivity and consequently the quantities set aside for sale and personal household consumption. Our study therefore suggests that, systematic expansion of climate-smart agricultural technologies such as adoption of drought-tolerant maize can significantly improve maize yields, sales and consumption in rural Zimbabwe. Our empirical results, robust to sensitivity checks, strongly point to the overall importance of DTM adoption in Zimbabwe. The findings from this paper also have very important implications for overall efforts on the promotion of climate-smart agriculture technologies in Africa and other developing countries

Perception of and adaptation to climate change by farmers in the Nile basin of Ethiopia

The present study employed the Heckman sample selection model to analyse the two- step process of adaptation to climate change, which initially requires farmers’ perception that climate is changing prior to responding to changes through adaptation. Farmers’ perception of climate change was significantly related to the age of the head of the household, wealth, knowledge of climate change, social capital and agro-ecological settings. Factors significantly affecting adaptation to climate change were: education of the head of the household, household size, whether the head of the household was male, whether livestock were owned, the use of extension services on crop and livestock production, the availability of credit and the environmental temperature