Affordable greenhouses: A tool to increase farmers' adaptive capacity to climate change

The African continent is most vulnerable to climate change due to a multitude of environmental stressors and low adaptive capacity. Climate change stresses agriculture via rising temperatures and changing precipitation patterns, as well as increased soil vulnerability, climate variability, pests and crop disease, and increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. Affordable greenhouse solutions work on a small, sustainable scale to mitigate some of the effects of climate change and provide strategies for smallholder farmers to adapt to the changing environment. Greenhouses cannot reverse climate change, but they are well suited to increase the adaptive capacity of the agricultural sector in developing nations. This article examines affordable greenhouses and the role they play in mitigating the effects of climate change for small-scale farmers.