Page 91 - FAO-IPCC Expert meeting on climate change

Appendix 01: Speakers’ summary notes
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family’) option that has been promoted in Rwanda. If the farm has enough resources to feed the animal (see critical assessment of that in Klapwijk et al., 2014) such an intervention can indeed transform the farm household and lead to immediate positive effects on food security (Paul et al., 2017).
Effects of climate change on the welfare of farm households are highly dependent on the production system. In cereal based systems dominated by maize, negative yield effects caused by climate change by the year 2050 can be up 30- 40% (e.g. Challinor et al., 2014; Lobell et al., 2008) and farmers need to adapt to compensate for these large yield losses. Farmers can do that by making use of intensification options and improved market prices, but in maize-based systems this type of adaptation, on average, can only just compensate for the negative effects of climate change. In sorghum and millet based systems likely climate change effects on productivity are smaller, and farmers can increase their income over time with the predicted increases in market prices. However, it is important to realize that these are average effects, and in each system there is a group of farmers that especially produces for home consumption, and therefore cannot profit from the higher market prices to compensate for the adverse climate change effects. In all cases there are farm households losing out because of climate change, and it is important to take this diversity of responses into account when evaluating adaptation options and quantifying the likely effects of climate change.
The targeting and prioritization of sustainable intensification options not only needs to take into account these differences between farm households and farming systems and their possible responses over time periods of 30-40 years, but also the fact that these livelihoods are changing rapidly over time at this very moment. In new household survey work using the rapid RHoMIS framework (Hammond et al., 2017) we show that even in short time spans as 3-4 years, up 60 to 70% of the farm households can be making significant changes in their farm (e.g. buying/selling land, land use and market orientation) in situations when there is good market access. The prioritization of intensification options has to take into account that we are dealing with a moving target where some farm households are intensifying, while other households are preparing for an exit out of farming. The trajectories of these farm households strongly influence their willingness to adopt agricultural innovation like for example sustainable intensification.
Concluding remarks
Different sustainable intensification interventions are attractive to different groups of farmers. For policy prioritization a key question to answer is ‘who do you want to target where?’. Analyses of climate change effects and likely changes in market prices over a time window up to 2050 show that increases in market opportunities and intensification may well outweigh positively the negative effects of climate change, depending on the production system. However, in all cases certain groups of farmers (especially those focusing on subsistence production) will lose out because they cannot compensate for the adverse effects of climate change on production. When doing these analyses it is important to take into account that change in farming systems and livelihoods is occurring at this very moment and that it is occurring rapidly: the farming systems of today might not be the farming systems of tomorrow! Another major trend in several countries in sub Saharan Africa, which we have not dealt with in detail in this executive summary, is the re-investment of urban wealth into agriculture. This might radically change the agricultural sector in these countries (at the moment still highly dependent on smallholder production) on shorter time scales than on which climate change is occurring. These changes need to be taken into account when evaluating the likely success of sustainable intensification, and thereby the efficiency of making investments in the promotion of sustainable intensification.
References
Brown, M.E., Antle, J.M., Backlund, P., Carr, E.R., Easterling, W.E., Walsh, M.K., Ammann, C., Attavanich, W., Barrett, C.B., Bellemare, M.F., Dancheck, V., Funk, C., Grace, K., Ingram, J.S.I., Jiang, H., Maletta, H., Mata, T., Murray, A., Ngugi, M., Ojima, D., O’Neill, B. & Tebaldi, C. 2015. Climate Change, Global Food Security, and the U.S. Food System. 146 pages. Available online at http://www.usda.gov/oce/climate_change/ FoodSecurity2015Assessment/FullAssessment.pdf.
Campbell B.M., Thornton P., Zougmore, R., van Asten, P. & Lipper, L. 2014. Sustainable intensification: What is its role in climate smart agriculture? Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 8:39–43.
Challinor, A.J., Watson, J., Lobell, D.B., Howden, S.M., Smith, D.R. & Chhetri, N. 2014. A meta-analysis of crop yield under climate change and adaptation. Nature Climate Change 4, 287-291.
Fischer, G., Shah, M., Tubiello, F. N. & van Velhuizen, H. 2005. Socio-economic and climate change impacts on agriculture: An integrated assessment, 1990–2080. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 360, 2067–2083.
FAO-IPCC Expert meeting on climate change, land use and food security