finding resilience in uncertain times | climate, food, energy, safety, money

The rural poor in developing countries—a group that includes around 2 billion small-holding farmers—are already feeling the effects of climate change. In the mountains of Peru, llama herders have noticed that storms are becoming more erratic and extreme. In Kenya, farmers face increasing drought that slashes crop yields. In Bangladesh, traditional ways of predicting the weather and seasons—such as timing when ants vacate their nests and measuring wind direction—now often fail to work. Even with drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, warming will continue for decades, and farmers, pastoralists and others living off the land will have to adapt to some degree. The question is whether these adaptations will be guided by informed, concerted efforts, or whether communities will be left to figure it out on their own.

Understanding Climate Change Adaptation: Lessons from Community-based Approaches

by Jonathan Ensor and Rachel Berger

Practical Action Publishing: 2009. 192pp. £14.95

In recent years, a small number of projects have looked at how informed interventions might help the rural poor adapt to such impacts. A new book, Understanding Climate Change Adaptation, may be the only non-academic title available that focuses specifically on this work.

The authors, Jonathan Ensor and Rachel Berger, work for Practical Action, a UK-based non-profit organization that has been one of the leaders in running adaptation projects. Practical Action—formerly known as the Intermediate Technology Development Group, or ITDG—has long been involved in the ‘appropriate technology’ movement, an effort to develop simple, low-cost technologies that tackle specific problems faced by the poor.

So it’s interesting that Ensor and Berger argue that what poor rural communities need to cope with climate change isn’t so much tailored technologies, such as raised bridges, improved levees and new varieties of crops to be grown as monocultures. Instead the authors support a ’second-generation’ approach to adaptation. This term encompasses less tangible measures such as bolstering and adding to existing stores of knowledge, creating new social networks and maintaining traditional practices of growing a diverse selection of crops. These measures, say the authors, should give people greater resilience and flexibility, and ultimately the ability to change their livelihoods in order to adapt, whatever may come.

Similarly, Ensor and Berger promote ‘no regrets’ adaptation approaches, arguing for projects that will help people cope with existing climate variability and natural disasters as well as with the anticipated impacts of anthropogenic warming. This blurs the lines between climate adaptation and more general efforts in the areas of development, poverty alleviation and reducing risk from disasters. But such blurring may be inescapable, say the authors, given the uncertainty in regional predictions about climate change.

In general, it’s expected that dry places will get drier and wet places will get wetter, for example. But many areas will buck this trend, and the rule of thumb doesn’t indicate how much wetter or drier any given region might become, how rainfall might be distributed throughout the year or whether it will tend to come as a drizzle or a deluge. Climate models are of some use in trying to get a sense of what’s likely to happen in the coming decades. But various models often disagree wildly about what will occur in a particular locale. In some places it’s not even clear whether rainfall will increase or decrease over the twenty-first century. With such uncertainty, Ensor and Berger argue, the best approach is to encourage resilience and the ability to adapt—an approach that helps people now and, if sustained, should continue to do so in the face of future climate change.

The book’s focus on small-scale projects, run by a handful of employees and reaching a few hundred to a few thousand rural people, means it addresses only part of the endeavour of climate change adaptation. It omits cities and the possibility of large-scale projects, such as building walls to hold back encroaching seas. Also, the book’s dry, somewhat academic descriptions of the various locales and projects means you have to look elsewhere to get an evocative picture of these places and people, and their problems.

But by focusing on rural poor communities, especially on farmers, the authors build a persuasive case that much of development to date has actually undermined people’s resilience rather than aided it. The green revolution, for example, has seen a huge boost in crop yields over the past few decades—but higher yields have come as a result of intensive irrigation, expensive chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and hybrid crops whose seeds can’t be saved to replant the next year. “Such agricultural systems are the antithesis of climate resilient and adaptive agriculture,” say the authors, since they foster dependence on commercial seed and chemical suppliers while erasing the diversity of crops people once grew. While many traditional crops have lower yields, they are also more resistant to drought, disease and other vagaries.

In showing what is being done on the ground to help people cope with climatic change, Ensor and Berger hope to bolster calls for more funding for adaptation. Of the money richer countries have pledged so far to aid adaptation in developing nations, they’ve contributed little—only a tiny fraction of the billions or tens of billions of dollars that might be needed each year for people to adapt reasonably well. At the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December, many developing countries hope to secure a deal with much greater financial support from the western world. Understanding Climate Change Adaptation not only supports the plea by these countries, it shows where the money, well spent, could make a big difference.

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