Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability to global environmental change: challenges and pathways for an action-oriented research agenda for middle-income and low-income countries

The socio-economic impacts of environmental stresses associated with global environmental change depend to a large extent on how societies organize themselves. Research on climate-related societal impacts, vulnerability and adaptation is currently underdeveloped, prompting international global environmental change research institutions to hold a series of meetings in 2009–2010. One of these aimed at identifying needs in middle-income and low-income countries (MLICs), and found that effective responses to the challenge of reducing vulnerability and enhancing adaptation will drive research and policy into challenging and innovative areas of research. Producing impacts, vulnerability and adaptation knowledge requires greater inclusion of MLIC researchers and a rethinking of the research structures, institutions and paradigms that have dominated global change research to date. Scientific literature discussed in this article suggests that governance issues need to become central objects of empirically based, detailed, multiscalar and action-oriented research, and that this needs to address the politically sensitive and seemingly intractable issue of reducing global inequities in power and resource distribution. The scientific literature suggests that without effective action in those directions, current trends toward greater inequality will continue to both reflect and intensify global environmental threats and their impacts

Regional perspectives on climate change adaptation research priorities : an overview from Africa; adaptation to climate change, IDRC, Feb. 6-7, 2007, Ottawa, Canada

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The potential of organic agriculture for contributing to climate change adaptation

Agriculture is and will be affected negatively by climate change in many regions. Most vulnerable are poor agricultural communities in the Global South and assuring food security for the twenty-first century requires successful adaptation to climate change in agriculture. Besides being affected by climate change, agriculture also contributes significantly to it. Some 10–15 per cent of total global greenhouse gas emissions are direct agricultural emissions. Adding emissions from conversion to agricultural land increases this share to more than 30 per cent. This chapter addresses the potential of organic farming systems to adapt to climate change. Depending on the context, the focus lies on the adaptation of the agricultural production system, of a community or at farm level. Adaptation strategies can be as diverse as changes in varieties cultivated (e.g. with increased drought resistance) or in management practices (e.g. mulching instead of burning of crop residues to reduce irrigation needs), physical investments for improved water management, a change in livelihoods from crop farming to animal husbandry, or even migration. Assessing success of adaptation can take several years to decades and some initially successful adaptation strategies may turn out to be a failure later on. Furthermore, the concepts used to frame adaptation in agriculture, such as resilience, need some further clarification and discussion. In this chapter, first we review briefly the main impacts of climate change on agriculture. We then present and clarify the key concepts for discussing adaptation measures in agriculture and address key challenges for their implementation. Subsequently, we analyse the adaptation potential of organic agriculture. We find that organic agriculture addresses most of the important challenges of successful adaptation. We also find that the current adaptation discussion in general does not sufficiently include the full adaptation potential of soil fertility (namely high levels of soil organic matter), of crop rotations and of biodiversity. After this, mitigation in organic agriculture is addressed briefly, in close linkage to the adaptation discussion. This is focused on the mitigation aspects that provide livelihood strategies and on synergies with adaptation, as there is already an extensive literature on the physical mitigation potential of organic agriculture. Mitigation aspects are also illustrated in Case study 1

Synthesis Report. Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions. Summary of the Copenhagen Climate Change Congress

This report was commisioned by University of Copenhage