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Feature, Tinomuda Chakanyuka
CLIMATE change has in recent times presented itself as one of the biggest threats to sustainable development, subsequently threatening people’s livelihoods.
Sub-Saharan Africa is particularly anticipated to be the most vulnerable because of low adaptive capacity and high dependency on climate sensitive resources such as water resources and ecological systems.
The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects says due to dry and hot climate blowing over sub-Saharan Africa, some of the countries in the region, Zimbabwe included, are likely to witness a devastating decline of agricultural yields by about 50 percent by the year 2050.
Over 50 percent of the population in sub-Saharan Africa is anticipated to go hungry as a result of shorter growing seasons, lowering yields, and shrinking revenue.
Researchers have also established that rainfall in the Horn of Africa is likely to become erratic with severe droughts becoming more common as a result of human induced global warming.
The IPCC climate projections indicate that the volatile weather conditions, are likely to culminate into more crop failures, and on current modes of production, lead to less agricultural output in all regions.
Staple crops such as corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans will become scarce and naturally food prices will soar.
The above synopsis, paints a sad picture for the future of humanity as it is placed at the mercy of climate change. Some of the effects of climate change are already manifest, as a prelude to much more devastating and catastrophic results of the phenomenon.
Thus the problem of climate change presents itself as one that needs to be tackled more aggressively requiring responses that put the world on a new path to climate smart development.
Adaptation and mitigation are the buzz words in climate change programming and these strategies are essential to cushion communities against the effects of climate change.
With proper adaptation and mitigation strategies, the effects of climate change can be far less devastating.
Rural communities whose major economic activity is subsistence farming are the ones most vulnerable at the hands of climate change.
As such various interventions to try and establish more climate change resilient rural farming have been implemented, but with very little success having been recorded.
So far, the various interventions, at national level have failed to sustainably improve the livelihoods of poor communities neither have they managed to mitigate the climate threat.
The reason may be, as some scholars argue, because national policies are aloof from the needs of local people or are a little more complex to be applied by local actors.
That calls for a different approach by policy makers, perhaps one that considers the scales of interest for the actors as well as local knowledge systems.
Climate change expert and lecturer at the Midlands State University in Gweru Mr Raymond Mugandani opined, “Current work that seeks to establish climate resilient rural farming has mostly been top down. Researchers, Government and donor organisations have regularly approached interventions piece-meal, assuming that small holder rural farming households and communities generally lack resources and knowledge to cope with and adapt to unfavourable climatic conditions, without fully appreciating the strength that lies in indigenous knowledge positively exploiting it.
“This often leads to poorly targeted interventions, poor adoption of recommended practices and ultimately an unfortunate waste or limited resources,” he said.
It’s a fact that mitigation and adaptation achieve the same goal, which is reducing the climate threats.
However, characteristic time-scales of these strategies and the people concerned vary and are distinct from one polity to another, as each area, country or regional block has its own unique challenges, different from the next.
Furthering the above argument, Mr Mugandani said, “Any new technologies or practices will have to be informed by a bottom-up approach where the farmers themselves are considered knowledge holders. Just because a technology has worked well under experimental conditions or in another country or continent doesn’t mean it is equally suitable for another.
“A case in point would be conservation agriculture, a practice that has been promoted all over for its well studied multiple benefits to farmers including climate resilience but has regularly faced hurdles when it comes to adoption by small holder farmers in some communities.”
Another climate change expert Mr Runesu Mutengwa concurred, calling on researchers to look into traditional farming practices as a source for future solutions of climate change effects.
“Climate change is likely to introduce new climatic conditions that may go beyond what the farmers have experienced in the past. This is where researchers are of value since they can model these future conditions and test out weather current and past coping strategies of small holder farmers,” he said.
The intimate understanding between traditional African communities and their natural environment around them is unprecedented and can’t go unmentioned in this discussion, as this has often been used as a strategy to adapt to changes in weather patterns.
Behaviours of certain animals and flowering of certain plants are a couple of the many important signals of changes in time and seasons that are well understood in traditional knowledge systems.
Such activities are useful in informing communities of changes in weather patterns, impending droughts and so on and as such traditional communities always found themselves a step ahead of catastrophe.
In coping with risks due to excessive or low rainfall, drought, and crop failure, traditional communities grow different crop varieties with different resistance and susceptibility to extreme weather conditions. This strategy ensured farmers of some form of harvest and food security regardless of the severity or volatility of weather conditions.
Zimbabwe is in the process of coming up with a National Adaptation Plan for climate change, and indigenous knowledge systems and practices should be incorporated to inform research on adaptation and mitigation.
National Climate Change director in the Ministry of Environment, Water and Climate Change Mr Washington Zhakata acknowledged the need to encompass traditional knowledges in coming up with strategies to mitigate climate change effects.
“Yes, our traditional communities have quite some interesting ways of coping with climate change as well as reducing human caused warming of the globe.
“Traditionally, it was forbidden to grow crops in certain wetlands. That in a way ensured that human activity would not destroy bio-diversity.
Indeed indigenous knowledge is going to be incorporated in our national climate change policy as an area of research where we would want to understand these practices and develop future intervention strategies that are more relevant to local communities,” he said.
Applying a little more effort to understand the resource strengths and knowledge held by local communities will save time and resources.
Small holder farmers in these communities have been operating under climate variability for decades and have learnt to cope with unfavourable climates in their communities over these years.
Because they understand their physical conditions and also their own socio-economic situations, they are the custodians of knowledge regarding how to cope with unfavourable climates given their varying situations.
As such, small holder farmers themselves must be the first port of call in any attempt to help them adapt to climate change among other external challenges.
@irielyan
Online Reporter