Working Paper

Climate change is becoming a source of significant additional risks for agriculture and food systems. Climate projections suggest that impacts will include shifting average growing conditions, increase climate and weather variability, and more uncertainty in predicting tomorrow’s climate and weather conditions. Agricultural risk management (ARM) is ideally placed to support stakeholders in building resilience to these increased risks in short and medium term.

According to the most recent IPCC report, changes in climates over the last 30 years have already reduced global agricultural production in the range 1-5 % per decade globally, with particularly negative effects for tropical cereal crops such as maize and rice (Porter et al., 2014). In addition, there is now mounting evidence suggesting that even at low (+2 ºC) levels of warming, agricultural productivity is likely to decline across the globe, but particularly across tropical areas (Challinor et al., 2014).

We apply a systematic review of peer-reviewed literature to assess constraining and enabling factors to the uptake of medium- to long-term climate information in a wide range of sectoral investment and planning decisions. Common applications of climate information are shown to relate to adaptation of environmental policy and planning, urban planning and infrastructure, as well as flood and coastal management.

Ongoing investments in agriculture will not deliver for Africa until the destabilising nature of crop pest events, especially shock outbreak events, are addressed. As a result of climate change, the prevalence of crop pests will change and the frequency of shock pest events will increase, putting agricultural systems at risk. The granularity of these changes, in terms of choices by farmers, cropping systems and markets, presents a critical challenge.

FARMD (July 2015) Livestock as a sector is extremely important to the global economy and to rural livelihoods. As of 2013, there was an estimated 38 billion livestock in the world, or five animals for every person. Most (81%) were in developing countries. Around one billion smallholder farmers keep livestock, many of them women. The burden of animal disease in developing countries is high: livestock disease probably kills 20% of ruminants and more than 50% of poultry each year causing a loss of approximately USD 300 billion per year.

It is important to analyse the impacts of climate change on target production system. However, it is more important to deduce possible adaptation strategies so that the research and developmental policies can be guided to meet the challenges of climate change. Impacts of climate change on the sorghum production system in India are analysed using InfoCrop-SORGHUM simulation model.

Document: 

Assessment on vulnerability of sorghum to climate change in India.pdf

This paper addresses various aspects of risk and risk management for smallholders in developing countries, and presents a quantitative assessment of farm-level risks and risk management strategies in three emerging economies: Brazil, China and Viet Nam. The analysis covers production, income, and poverty risks.

Document: 

OECD Smallholder Risk Management in Developing Countries.pdf

The Haitian population is among the poorest in the world, with over 78 percent living on less than United States (U.S.) 2 dollar a day and over 50 percent living on less than U.S. 1 dollar a day. This paper extracts relevant lessons from historical data on factors influencing the receipt of extension services in Haiti, taking stock of the use of agricultural extension services prior to the 2010 earthquake. The goal is to influence future policies and development projects involving the provision of extension services as well as the type of extension services offered.

This paper examines agriculture-climate change policy discussions in Ghana in the context of, on the one hand, increasing international interest and activity around climate change and agriculture, and on the other, concerns over whether climate policy and funding priorities are aligned to domestic development priorities.

This paper explores climate change – agriculture debates in Malawi in view of the increasing interest and funding pledges for the agricultural sector in a changing climate. While there is increasing evidence of how climate change may affect Malawian agricultural systems, and a growing body of literature on possible response strategies, less is known about how priorities are made, by whom and with what outcomes. This matters because climate-related funding can be a major factor for how the agricultural sector develops, in Malawi as in other countries across Africa.