Category: Climate change

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Adaptation for tropical forests, tropical forests for adaptation

“Climate change could have a devastating effect on the world’s forests and the nearly 1 billion people who depend on them for their livelihoods” 1 says the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in a press release about a new report.

Unless immediate action is taken.

CIFOR proposes helping forests adapt by taking measures such as improving fire management; using plantation species that can cope with future climate; and helping forests evolve with changing climate rather than resist it. Forests can help us adapt — reduce the vulnerability of society to climate change — by assuring the flow of ecosystem services.

There should be help for the people who are managing, living in or conserving forests to adapt to future changes:

“The people living in forests are highly dependent on forest goods and services and are often very vulnerable socioeconomically,” says Bruno Locatelli, a CIFOR scientist and lead author of the report. “They usually have a much more intimate understanding of their forests than anyone else, but the unprecedented rates of climate change will almost certainly jeopardise their ability to adapt to new conditions. They will need help.”

Helping the people who know best seems an interesting contradiction and I wondered how they were proposing to go about that. Participatory approaches, it seems. I could not find that much about it in the report, which focuses on process and policy. Take this excerpt from Box 11 on “The role of science in coordinating and supporting adaptive processes in West Africa” (by Houria Djoudi, Hermann Kambire and Maria Brockhaus).

A workshop on local governance, forests and adaptive capacities in a municipality in southwest Burkina Faso, with actors from different scales, established a platform for shared knowledge and learning on forests and adaptation to climate change. Efforts to contribute to vertical coordination of adaptation, as well as support for local governance and horizontal coordination in decision making processes related to climate change adaptation and forests, are ongoing.

CIFOR also has an interesting little report on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD).

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Hot air on climate change?

Over before it began, in the sense that nothing actually happens until we report it here, the first meeting of the Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group (AHTEG) on Biodiversity and Climate Change of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) took place in London from 17-21 November 2008. Did AHTEG consider either the impact of climate change of the diversity of crops and their wild relatives, or the need to crops and their wild relatives to mitigate the impacts of climate change?

Our source does not say, and I simply don’t know, and a quick glance at the list of meeting documents is no help. Someone, enlighten us, please.

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Nibbles: Food, Potatoes, Medicine, Bees, Beer, Food miles, Fungi, Fruits cubed

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Input fairs: the view from the ground

One of the FAO’s preferred responses to food emergencies is the Input Trade Fair. Farmers receive a voucher, which they can exchange for seeds and other inputs that they need for a better harvest. In 2007, for example, 20,000 government-selected families in central and eastern Swaziland received vouchers that they could spend at one of 25 Input Trade Fairs. Earlier this year, FAO described these fairs as “winners”. But as the 2008 planting season gets under way, the news from Mbabane is not good.

Activities_at_the_Matsanjeni_Input_Trade_Fair.jpg A report carried by IPS says that Swazi Input Fairs [are] Falling Short. Far fewer farmers have received vouchers this season. In the wake of rising prices the vouchers are not enough to purchase all the inputs needed. More vendors have entered the market, cutting down on sales for existing vendors. But most worrying of all, according to the report most of the subsistence farmers who have benefited from the scheme are no nearer being able to stand on their own feet than they were before the scheme started. Some, it is said, have no real interest in farming. They are just hungry, and wash the pesticidal dressings off the seeds before cooking and eating them. Many farmers refuse to switch away from maize, which needs far more water than crops such as sorghum.

While an on-the-spot report such as this one offers some insights, it does not indicate how Swaziland’s drought-stricken farmers could best tackle their problems. Maybe they need more extension help, to show them how to make better use of their inputs. Maybe they need radical changes in their methods. I was at a meeting in London on Wednesday where I saw a very short video called Greening the Desert. Geoff Lawton, of the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia, explained in tantalizing snippets how he had transformed a barren patch of Jordan into a flourishing orchard. No, I have not seen peer-reviewed results. But it seems worth trying elsewhere, and Swaziland could be a good place to do so.