Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia already stressed by climate.
Tools to adapt range from ancient plow to modern computer.
Governments and development agencies seen as part of solution.
April 21, 2008 - In the food bowl of southern Zambia, a maize farmer surveys his crop. The stalks are brown and stunted. The yield will be a ton or less per hectare - a fraction of a good year's harvest.
The Zambian farmer knows from experience he's coping with something bigger and worse than a drought. In his Tonga dialect it's kukasaala kwanyika (global warming).
Scenes like this one play out regularly in the food bowls of the poorest countries, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
These regions are already stressed by climate change. Just a 2°C increase in temperatures globally - the low end of forecasts to 2050 - could have huge, adverse impacts on food bowls. The almost-certain results under worst-case scenarios: more frequent and worse droughts and more frequent and violent storms followed by worse flooding.
1.4 Billion People in 54 Countries Are Affected
According to 2006 estimates by the World Bank's Development and Research Group, agricultural losses from global warming in the poorest countries could hit US$41 billion to US$102 billion annually. Some 1.4 billion people in 54 countries, many of them already malnourished, could go hungrier. Hundreds of millions of the yet-to-be-born would face a similar fate.
But that specter doesn't have to happen, say World Bank experts tasked to help prevent it. In many instance, adapting agriculture to climate change could make the big difference, they say.
Mitigation - reducing carbon loadings in the atmosphere that cause most global warming - has received the most attention, and funding, as the world confronts what to do about climate change. But mitigation could take decades to achieve its objectives. Adaptation for agriculture doesn't focus on reducing carbon loadings. But it could help many farmers avoid the worst impacts of climate change - right now.
Agricultural adaptation uses tools as ancient as the plow and as new as the computer.
It could be as simple as changing tillage practices to conserve soil and water, or as high tech as planting new, heat-resistant strains of seeds tailored to localized temperature forecasts. It could involve an expensive investment in irrigation if the numbers show that there would be a payoff in net revenue per hectare - and if there are ample water resources to tap. Adaptation experts at the World Bank - economists, environmentalists, agronomists - are focusing much of their attention on Sub-Saharan Africa, where three-quarters of the population depends on agriculture, some of it practiced in the world's most climate-stressed areas.
'Farmers Will Be Able to Adapt to Future Climate Change'
It is difficult to predict just how much farmers will be able to adapt to climate change, given the unpredictability of the changes to come. Some people in the international development community believe that the past is a good indication of how farmers can respond in the future.
Ariel Dinar, Lead Economist with the Bank's Development and Research unit, for instance, says that new research indicates "African farming is very resilient to climate change and farmers will be able to adapt to future changes in climate."
The research included climate, water, soil, and economic data from 16 "agro-ecological" zones in Sub-Saharan Africa that was modeled against four future climate scenarios. It finds that "unless warming is severe, farmer incomes will not fall further," Dinar said.
But to avoid progressively worse outcomes in most of the scenarios, said Dinar, adaptation would have to be implemented on a coordinated, comprehensive scale that extends from individual farmers to policy makers at agricultural, finance, and social ministries, with development organizations like the World Bank assisting with funding and expertise.
Dinar said adaptation, if it's done across agro-ecological zones that don't follow country borders, could, in most cases, introduce many alternative practices that produce "substantial enough results to justify the costs." The scenarios he and his co-author modeled showed that net revenue per farm could increase even in cases where expensive irrigation was added and water was available.
Theoretically, adaptation gives farmers wide choices, but many may not have the wherewithal to make those choices. "This is where the government may have to come in and help them," Dinar said. "Or the World Bank can come in and help initiate an adaptation project."
Adaptation for agriculture on a coordinated, comprehensive scale, involving public and private assistance, is still in its infancy. But pioneering analysis and recently started on-the-ground Bank-supported projects in Andhra Pradesh in India have produced encouraging results in that drought-stricken, impoverished rural state, said Ian Noble, Senior Climate Change Specialist in the Bank's Environment Department, and co-author of a recently published book on the Andhra Pradesh turnaround.
A permanent shift away from rice to crops not so hungry for water, such as millet or peanuts, is one example of adaptation helping to bring some economic stability to Andhra Pradesh, the book, Overcoming Drought: Adaptation for Andhra Pradesh, India, found.
But up to now robust adaptation strategies in agriculture have been the exception rather than the rule in developing countries.
Bank Now Pursuing More Ambitious Adaptation Strategy
Between 2000 and 2007, only 17 out of 73 country assistance strategies (CAS's) for poor countries aided through the Bank's International Development Association (IDA) referred to the potential effects of climate changes, Noble's research showed. Even fewer had a clear statement about climate change. A new computer software tool developed by Noble and his team identifies climate risks and suggests how they could be met. Risks are graded by color, with red being the most serious.
Perhaps the most significant example of the Bank's new direction will be its forthcoming Strategic Framework for Climate Change and Development. The Framework will, among other things, provide direction on how adaptation - in agriculture as well as other impacted areas, such as flood-prone coasts - can be integrated into country, sectoral, and regional development strategies.
Fully integrated adaptation programs - covering agriculture, flood abatement, and other defensive measures -- could increase the cost of IDA projects by 6 to 21 percent (US$714 million to US$2.5 billion) annually, according to recent estimates of the SFCCD team. How those costs would be covered, and who is to pay them, are yet to be determined.
Subsistence Farmers Face Daunting Adaptation Odds
Farmers worldwide have shown great capacity to respond to climate variability and shocks using a variety of strategies, says Sergio Margulis, a Lead Environmental Economist for the World Bank. However, the poorest farmers who typically rely exclusively on subsistence agriculture and tend to occupy marginal and low productivity lands may find too few alternatives to cope with the additional stress from climate change, even under modest scenarios of future temperature increases, Margulis says.
"One cannot be too optimistic about the capacity - both institutional and financial - of governments in the poorer countries to guide adaptation and to provide the right incentives," says Margulis, who is doing a study on the newly emerging economics of adaptation. "Furthermore, since many of the consequences of climate change are uncertain or unknown, one cannot fully rely on past adaptation experience. The risks to the most vulnerable farmers are very significant."
"Sub-Saharan Africa clearly is the greatest concern. Increasing agricultural productivity in the region has already proven to be an almost insurmountable challenge, and the additional effects from climate change are generally only going to make things worse. Helping farmers to relocate to more productive agricultural areas or to find new employment opportunities has also not proven easy, and the social costs involved would necessarily be very high."
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