Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change最新文献

Abstract

This study investigates the factors affecting maize farmers’ decisions to adopt climate-smart agricultural (CSA) technologies and estimates the impacts of CSA technology adoption on maize yields and net farm income. Unlike most previous studies that analyze a single technology, we consider different combinations of three CSA technologies (zero tillage, row planting, and drought-resistant seed). A multinomial endogenous switching regression model addresses selection bias issues arising from observed and unobserved factors and analyses data collected from 3197 smallholder farmers in three Ghana regions (Brong-Ahafo, Northern, and Ashanti). The findings show that smallholder farmers’ decisions to adopt multiple CSA technologies are influenced by farmer-based organization membership, education, resource constraints such as lack of land, access to markets, and production shocks such as perceived pest and disease stress and drought. We also find that adopting all three CSA technologies together has the largest impact on maize yields, while adopting row planting and zero tillage as a combination has the largest impact on net farm income. Governments should collaborate with farmer-based groups and extension officers to improve farmers’ awareness and understanding of the benefits associated with CSA technologies and help them adopt multiple technologies that generate higher benefits.

Global interest in innovative adaptation approaches in climate-smart agriculture is growing, and adaptation technologies are expanding. This study investigates technological developments in agricultural adaptation innovation through an analysis of specific technology classifications in a global patent database. Patent keyword co-occurrence network analyses show that greenhouse technologies have received increased R&D attention, while early composting processing technologies have evolved into organic fertilizer product innovation. Biotechnology has been another area of R&D, seeking desirable traits suited to the changing climatic conditions. Resource restoration innovations have recently emerged. Addressing climate challenges, these technologies broaden climate-smart agriculture policy options, from general to specific operations. They provide the means for integration with nature-based adaptation strategies, but their diffusion (and hence potential) may be limited by the path dependence of ownership. While commercialization will continue to drive innovation diffusion, international cooperation is desirable to better facilitate technology transfer. Future efforts are recommended to reduce the complexity of climate-smart agriculture. As technology becomes more available and integrated with nature-based solutions, it is our recommendation that policymakers and governments should consistently seek to reduce impediments to an exchange of knowledge.

Transparent, accurate, comparable, and complete estimates of greenhouse gas emissions and removals are needed to support mitigation goals and performance assessments under the Paris Agreement. Here, we present a comparative analysis of the agriculture forestry and other land use (AFOLU) emission estimates from different datasets, including National Greenhouse Gas Inventories (NGHGIs), FAOSTAT, the BLUE, OSCAR, and Houghton (here after updated H&N2017) bookkeeping models; Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR); and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We disaggregate the fluxes for the forestry and other land use (FOLU) sector into forest land, deforestation, and other land uses (including non-forest land uses), while agricultural emissions are disaggregated according to the sources (i.e., livestock, croplands, rice cultivation, and agricultural fires). Considering different time periods (1990–1999, 2000–2010, and 2011–2018), we analyse the trend of the fluxes with a key focus on the tropical regions (i.e., Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia). Three of the five data sources indicated a decline in the net emissions over the tropics over the period 1990–2018. The net FOLU emissions for the tropics varied with values of 5.47, 5.22, 4.28, 3.21, and 1.17 GtCO₂ year⁻¹ (for BLUE, OSCAR, updated H&N2017, FAOSTAT, and NGHGIs, respectively) over the recent period (2011–2018). Gross deforestation emissions over the same period were 5.87, 7.16, 5.48, 3.96, and 3.74 GtCO₂ year⁻¹ (for BLUE, OSCAR, updated H&N2017, FAOSTAT, and NGHGIs). The net forestland sink was −1.97, −3.08, −2.09, −0.53, and −3.00 GtCO₂ year⁻¹ (for BLUE, OSCAR, updated H&N2017, FAOSTAT, and NGHGIs). Continental analysis indicated that the differences between the data sources are much large in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia than in Latin America. Disagreements in the FOLU emission estimates are mainly explained by differences in the managed land areas and the processes considered (i.e., direct vs indirect effects of land use change, and gross vs net accounting for deforestation). Net agricultural emissions from cropland, livestock, and rice cultivation were more homogenous across the FAOSTAT, EDGAR, and EPA datasets, with all the data sources indicating an increase in the emissions over the tropics. However, there were notable differences in the emission from agricultural fires. This study highlights the importance of investing and improving data sources for key fluxes to achieve a more robust and transparent global stocktake.

International civil society and non-government organisations (NGOs) play a role in implementing agricultural projects, which contribute to the mitigation, adaptation, and food security dimensions of climate-smart agriculture (CSA). Despite the growth of CSA, it remains unclear how CSA is designed, conceptualised, and embedded into agricultural development projects led and implemented by NGOs, creating a lack of clarity as to the direction of future of agricultural development interventions. This paper examines the extent to which development programmes from the NGO sector actively incorporate CSA principles to benefit smallholder farmers under the major pillars of CSA. Drawing from six projects’ documentation since 2009, we conducted a thematic analysis to reveal the alignment of projects with the pillars of CSA and discuss the extent to which CSA allows for localised adaptability given the diverse agricultural contexts in which civil society and NGOs work. We find that despite a lack of clarity in CSA definition and focus, the agricultural practices in the six projects make heterogenous contributions to the adoption of CSA principles. We illustrate the diversity of ways in which CSA is ‘done’ by a global NGO across six areas: greening and forests, practices and knowledge exchange, markets, policy and institutions, nutrition, carbon and climate, and gender. We discuss the need for balance in contextual adaptability across the three pillars of CSA with explicit consideration of trade-offs to reduce unintended outcomes from CSA initiatives. We conclude with reflections on the role of civil society and NGOs as boundary agents in the agricultural development sector.

Climate change is a serious concern that threatens global food security in several ways and exerts pressure on the already stressed agriculture system. The future prediction of a decline in the yield of major food grains like rice, wheat, and maize due to adverse impacts of increased warming and other climatic variabilities paves the way to shift the existing agriculture practices to more resource-efficient agriculture. This has entailed the government promoting climate-smart agriculture with its triple objectives, i.e. adaptation, mitigation, and food security. The current study developed a composite weighted indicator-based index to compute climate smartness score (CSS) at the farm level in India and tested its effectiveness in measuring the climate resilience of the farmers in Sehore, Satna, and Rajgarh districts of Madhya Pradesh, India, who adopted climate-smart practices in a pilot project. Thirty-four indicators grouped in five dimensions were selected from relevant peer-reviewed articles and various technical documents through an intensive literature review. These indicators were validated through online and offline expert consultation with ninety-two experts and farmers, and weights were assigned using AHP-express. The study inferred that the final scores and weightage across dimensions and the indicators did not differ significantly, implying that each dimension and indicator is important. A strong positive linear relationship between the climate smartness score and the crop yield further suggested that the wider adoption of these interventions would reduce the climate risk in agriculture for farming communities. This framework would help monitor the effectiveness of various climate-smart agriculture programmes and improve the implementation and upscaling of such programmes.

The CO₂ emission rates have been continuously incremented during the last decades. To mitigate it, a method to store carbon in terrestrial ecosystems is the addition of biochar to soil. After its application to soil, biochar suffers an ageing process, able to deteriorate its functional properties as soil improver. However, at present, it is not clear how to evaluate biochar ageing. The main aim of this study is to evaluate biochar ageing by determination of temporal changes on (a) soil respiration after biochar addition and (b) the relationship between CO₂ adsorption capacity and wettability of biochar as measurable parameters indicating biochar ageing. Results show that 1 month after biochar addition, soil respiration decreased when poplar and pine biochars were applied to bare soils, in the absence of vegetation. One year after biochar addition, this reduction on soil respiration disappeared, evidencing biochar ageing due to decrements on its CO₂ adsorption capacity. Compared with fresh biochar, decreased CO₂ adsorption capacity of biochar corresponded with enhanced biochar wettability for both biochar types. Its means that poplar and pine biochars, while initially hydrophobic, became hydrophilic after 1 year of its application to soil. It is concluded that changes of biochar CO₂ adsorption capacity in time go along with improved wettability as mutually opposed processes. Globally, pine biochar tends to adsorb a higher quantity of CO₂ than poplar biochar. The absence of CO₂ adsorption of soil without biochar demonstrates the remarkable capacity of both biochars to adsorb carbon dioxide and promote carbon storage in soils.

Does climate change influence if societies will be better or worse equipped to reduce climatic risks in the future? A society’s adaptive capacity determines whether the potential of adaptation to reduce risks will be realized. Assumptions about the level of adaptive capacity are inherently made when the potential for adaptation to reduce risks in the future and resultant levels of risk are estimated. In this review, we look at the literature on human impacts of climate change through the lens of adaptive capacity. Building on evidence of impacts on financial resources as presented in the Working Group 2 (WG2) report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), we here present the methodology behind this review and complement it with an analysis of climatic risks to human resources. Based on our review, we argue that climate change itself adds to adaptation constraints and limits. We show that for more realistic assessments of sectoral climate risks, assumed levels of future adaptive capacity should — and can — be usefully constrained in assessments that rely on expert judgment, and propose avenues for doing so.

Adopting climate-smart agricultural practices (CAPs) has the potential to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change and directly influence the well-being of households. Therefore, this research investigates the impact of CAP adoption intensity on household income, net farm income, and income diversity, using the 2020 China Rural Revitalization Survey data. We utilize the approach of two-stage residual inclusion (2SRI) to mitigate the endogeneity of CAP adoption intensity. The results show that CAP adoption intensity positively and significantly affects household income, net farm income, and income diversity. Heterogeneous analysis indicates that the impacts of CAP adoption intensity on household income increase across the selected quantiles, but the impacts on net farm income decrease across the same. In addition, CAP adoption intensity significantly improves income diversity only at the 20th quantile. Our findings suggest that enhancing farmers’ CAP adoption intensity improves rural household welfare.

Due to the rapidly changing climate, the frequency of extreme rainfall has increased worldwide. Consequently, various climate change adaptation policies have been proposed to mitigate the increasing flood risk. However, few studies have examined the effects of these adaptation policies on flood damage. Therefore, this study developed a research framework to evaluate the flood damage reduction effect of adaptation policies to the changing climate. A flood damage function developed for 15 administrative districts in South Korea was integrated with an adaptation policy effect assessment module based on a non-linear regression model and a climate change impact assessment module based on non-stationary frequency analysis. Historic climate data and future climate projection data from CMIP6 global climate models were used for the frequency analysis. The flood damage reduction effect of climate change adaptation policies was determined across various future projection periods and temperature increase scenarios. It was found that the flood damage gradually increased from the +2 °C scenario to the +5 °C scenario, though this flood damage was reduced by 43–44% with the implementation of corresponding adaptation policies. The macro-scale assessment framework proposed in this research, which incorporates flood damage records, climate observations, socioeconomic data reflecting flood mitigation capabilities, and climate model outputs for future projections, has the potential to be employed for a wide range of applications.

Climate change affects both the natural (ecological) and manmade (social) systems across the continents. In the Central Himalaya, renowned for its diverse altitudes, climates, landforms, biodiversity, ethnicities, cultures, and farming systems, complex interactions occur between social and ecological subsystems. The research employs the socio-ecological systems (SESs) approach to assess vulnerability and devise effective adaptation strategies for climate change in the region. Three SESs were chosen as templates for the vulnerability and adaptation assessment. Primary data was collected using the participatory rural appraisal (PRA) method from 14 villages with these SESs. We adopted an indicator-based approach to assess vulnerability, including components such as exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity, to calculate the socio-ecological vulnerability index (SEVI). Our results showed varying patterns of vulnerability across the SESs. Sixty-eight percent of the surveyed households have “high” to “very high” socio-ecological vulnerability levels in all three SESs. The results revealed that Himalayan Moist Temperate/Irrigated agrarian (agrarian)-populated (low) community (SES_B3) has a “very high” level, Himalayan Moist Temperate/Unirrigated agrarian (small)-populated (low) community (SES_B6) has a “high” level, and Alpine/Unirrigated agrarian (small)-populated (low) community (SES_A6) has a medium socio-ecological vulnerability level. In addition to assessing vulnerability, we examined current and potential adaptation strategies and associated barriers. The findings revealed major adaptation strategies by the households and communities in agriculture, forest, health, information, infrastructure, policy, natural disasters, livelihood, and water. Our research culminates in the development of an SES-based adaptation framework as a major outcome. This framework assists in understanding local needs and identifying gaps in existing policies and institutional arrangements for sustainable development of the Himalaya. Our SES-based vulnerability and adaptation assessment offers a robust methodology applicable to the entire Indian Himalayan Region and other mountain ecosystems. It provides valuable insights for effective adaptation strategies to address climate change.