The Role of Sustainable Land Management for Climate ... - CAADP

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temperatures support yield growth in most of Africa as long as sufficient water is available),
which suggests that irrigation might be an effective adaptation strategy 2 .
Output from 20 GCMs shows that many food crops in Southern Africa will be negatively
affected without adaptation (Lobell et al. 2008). During extreme El Niño years (drought years),
productivity in southern Africa is expected to drop by 20 to 50 percent, with maize being the
crop most drastically affected (Stige et al. 2006). Crops and regions likely to be particularly
adversely affected from climate change include: maize and wheat in Southern Africa, groundnuts
in West Africa and wheat in the Sahel (Lobell et al. 2008). Fischer et al. (2005) even suggest that
by 2080 suitable land for wheat might completely disappear in Africa. However, these
predictions do not take into account improvements in crop technologies and changes in farm
management practices, and thus might overestimate adverse impacts. On the other hand, these
predictions likely underestimate the potential impacts of extreme events, including storms, fires,
and floods, and are not well suited to model the long-term effect of droughts on river flows and
groundwater availability.
According to Fischer et al. (2005), most climate model scenarios agree that Sudan,
Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Somalia, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Chad, Sierra Leone,
Angola, Mozambique and Niger are likely to lose cereal production potential by the 2080s.
Those countries account for 45 percent of the total number of undernourished people in sub-
Sahara Africa, or 87 million undernourished people. On the other hand, Zaire, Tanzania, Kenya,
Uganda, Madagascar, Ivory Coast, Benin, Togo, Ghana and Guinea (accounting for 38 percent of
the undernourished population in SSA) are projected to gain cereal-production potential by the
2080s (Fischer, Shah, and Van Velthuizen 2002; Fischer et al. 2005).
Climate variations tend to disproportionately affect livelihoods of the rural poor as a
result of their reduced capacity to buffer against climate risk through assets or the financial
market (Brown et al. 2008). Therefore, appropriate adaptation measures targeted at this group
should be a priority.
Sustainable land management measures are among the important approaches that
households can use to adapt to climate vulnerability and change. For example, most farmers in
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% !The authors used the Ricardian model, linking land rents and climate, proxied by the present value of
future net revenue, for this analysis. This is somewhat controversial for the context in SSA given poor
land and other markets. !
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