Assessment of Agricultural Resilience Under Climate Change and Its Relation to Food Insecurity and Migration in the Northern Triangle of Central America

Excerpts from the Executive Summary: The Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA) is composed of three countries, namely El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Besides having common geographic features, the countries are characterized by increasing migration, and exposure and vulnerability to climate change. Agriculture is a significant sector that employs large numbers of rural population across the three countries. Concurrently, it is also heavily impacted by climate variability and climate change, which compounds the existing vulnerabilities of people employed in agriculture. The report is based on analyzing four main agricultural systems which are key for more than 80 percent of agricultural households in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras: coffee, staple grains, livestock, and vegetables. The objective of this report is to systematize primary data and existing knowledge about climate change impacts and vulnerability of the agricultural sector in the NTCA countries, specifically of coffee, staple grains, livestock and vegetables farmers, with an additional aim of having spatial detail on livelihoods and beneficiaries of interventions for building resilience and contributing to the U.S. Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America. To our best knowledge, this report is the only one to use systems and livelihoods approach for an analysis of agricultural vulnerability, resilience, food security and migration, and to additionally provide a comprehensive inquiry that includes spatial specificity. The report links the results of the analysis with the existing, on-the-ground practices and it offers concrete proposals for actions in the NTCA. Based on the field data, USDA and CATIE scientists’ inputs, and complemented with reviews of relevant literature, this report highlights some of the key issues related to agricultural livelihoods, their resilience to the effects of climate change, and interlinkages of agricultural resilience, food security and migration, and it provides concrete suggestions for strategic interventions for increasing agricultural resilience in the NTCA

Assessment of Agricultural Resilience Under Climate Change and Its Relation to Food Insecurity and Migration in the Northern Triangle of Central America

Excerpts from the Executive Summary: The Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA) is composed of three countries, namely El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Besides having common geographic features, the countries are characterized by increasing migration, and exposure and vulnerability to climate change. Agriculture is a significant sector that employs large numbers of rural population across the three countries. Concurrently, it is also heavily impacted by climate variability and climate change, which compounds the existing vulnerabilities of people employed in agriculture. The report is based on analyzing four main agricultural systems which are key for more than 80 percent of agricultural households in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras: coffee, staple grains, livestock, and vegetables. The objective of this report is to systematize primary data and existing knowledge about climate change impacts and vulnerability of the agricultural sector in the NTCA countries, specifically of coffee, staple grains, livestock and vegetables farmers, with an additional aim of having spatial detail on livelihoods and beneficiaries of interventions for building resilience and contributing to the U.S. Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America. To our best knowledge, this report is the only one to use systems and livelihoods approach for an analysis of agricultural vulnerability, resilience, food security and migration, and to additionally provide a comprehensive inquiry that includes spatial specificity. The report links the results of the analysis with the existing, on-the-ground practices and it offers concrete proposals for actions in the NTCA. Based on the field data, USDA and CATIE scientists’ inputs, and complemented with reviews of relevant literature, this report highlights some of the key issues related to agricultural livelihoods, their resilience to the effects of climate change, and interlinkages of agricultural resilience, food security and migration, and it provides concrete suggestions for strategic interventions for increasing agricultural resilience in the NTCA

Data from: Crop pests and predators exhibit inconsistent responses to surrounding landscape composition

AbstractThe idea that noncrop habitat enhances pest control and represents a win–win opportunity to conserve biodiversity and bolster yields has emerged as an agroecological paradigm. However, while noncrop habitat in landscapes surrounding farms sometimes benefits pest predators, natural enemy responses remain heterogeneous across studies and effects on pests are inconclusive. The observed heterogeneity in species responses to noncrop habitat may be biological in origin or could result from variation in how habitat and biocontrol are measured. Here, we use a pest-control database encompassing 132 studies and 6,759 sites worldwide to model natural enemy and pest abundances, predation rates, and crop damage as a function of landscape composition. Our results showed that although landscape composition explained significant variation within studies, pest and enemy abundances, predation rates, crop damage, and yields each exhibited different responses across studies, sometimes increasing and sometimes decreasing in landscapes with more noncrop habitat but overall showing no consistent trend. Thus, models that used landscape-composition variables to predict pest-control dynamics demonstrated little potential to explain variation across studies, though prediction did improve when comparing studies with similar crop and landscape features. Overall, our work shows that surrounding noncrop habitat does not consistently improve pest management, meaning habitat conservation may bolster production in some systems and depress yields in others. Future efforts to develop tools that inform farmers when habitat conservation truly represents a win–win would benefit from increased understanding of how landscape effects are modulated by local farm management and the biology of pests and their enemies