Adapting to Climate Change: Assessing the World Bank Group ...

CHAPTER 3CLIMATE VARIABILITYRAINFED SYSTEMS AND THE DRYLANDS, WITH A FOCUS ON SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA3.11 About 820 million rural people in the developing world live in the drylands, wheremoisture stress constrains agriculture and climate sensitivity is severe (World Bank 2007).These areas produce 30 percent of the developing world’s agricultural output on 54 percentof its agricultural land. Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa arefurther constrained by poor market access, with more than 30 percent of the populationfurther than five hours from a market. 213.12 Regions of current climate sensitivity overlap with places where the environmentaland social impacts from climate change would be most severe. These hotspots ofvulnerability to climate change are all in rainfed systems and include the mixed arid–semiarid systems in the Sahel, arid-semiarid rangelands in parts of eastern Africa, thecoastal regions of eastern Africa, and many of the drier regions of southern Africa(Thornton, Jones and others 2006).3.13 The World Bank is investing in rainfed agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa. IEGmapped the locations of active agricultural projects in Africa according to two dimensionsthat have a strong influence on poverty and on resilience: desert and dryland versus humidregions, and remoteness from markets. (See Appendix H1 for details.) Forty percent of(identifiable) project locations were in desert or dryland areas, as compared to about half ofthe rural population. Fifteen percent of project locations were in areas that were both dryand remote, compared to 25 percent of the population.3.14 The productivity of Sub-Saharan agriculture is much below its potential due toinadequate management of land and water in smallholder agriculture (Penning de Vries,Rabbinge and others 1997; Nin-Pratt, Johnson and others 2011). Inadequate management,in turn, reflects institutional constraints on technology delivery, and inadequate marketincentives (Nin-Pratt, Johnson and others 2011; World Bank 2008).3.15 Yield gap reductions are closely tied up with increased resilience. First, better soiland water management practices such as better combination of inorganic and organicfertilizer, crop rotation, and water infiltration techniques would be expected to boost yieldswhile increasing the resilience of cropping to variability in rainfall. Likewise, newtechnologies such as drought, heat, salt, and flood-tolerant crop varieties, and improvedlivestock breeds and feeding systems could boost both average yields and resilience. (It ispossible, though, that there may be trade-offs.) Higher crop yields and livestock offtake,together with well-functioning markets, result in higher levels of income for farmers andgreater demand for farm labor. Farmers with more assets are more likely to be able towithstand price and weather shocks. Such farmers also tend to have more diversecropping and non-farm activities that correlate positively with higher incomes (Ellis andFreeman 2004)36