ghana climate change vulnerability and adaptation assessment

would include concentrating access to land in the hands of wealthy producers, while smallholders would losetheir use rights.Crops are vulnerable to climate variability as evidenced by obviously lower yields during drought periods andless dramatically by year-to-year variation in productivity. Variability can take many forms, such as less totalannual precipitation, delayed onset of the rainy period, higher temperature or sub-optimum moisture duringcritical growth stages. Changes in average climate values in regions currently at the limit for growing somecrops could reduce yields to non-viable levels, for example, causing a shift towards agropastoral systems. Thecomplexity of crop growth requires climate data (short-term variability, frequency of extreme events) atspatial and temporal resolutions that are currently beyond the reach of climate change models. In addition toinadequate climate models, crop modeling research has favored the major global food crops and devoted lessattention to crops important to Ghana, such as millet and yams. Additionally, crop models generally arespecified for monocropping and rarely consider intercropping. Improvements in climate and crop models andthe ability to model effects at scales from the farmer’s field to the region and nation will be critical toformulating adaptation options for agriculture and mainstreaming climate change into developmentprograms.ECOLOGICAL VULNERABILITYThe African continent is among the most likely to suffer adverse impacts of climate change because ofvulnerable social and natural systems, multiple interacting stresses, and low adaptive capacity. Ghana spans arange of climatic and edaphic zones from coastal mangroves and rainforests along the coast to savanna in thenorth. In much of sub-Saharan Africa, precipitation is inherently variable from year to year. This is oftenexpressed as recurrent drought and periodic flooding. Between 1991 and 2008, Ghana experienced six majorfloods with >2 million people affected by the floods in 1991. The northern savanna zone is exposed to floodsas well as drought. In 2007, floods followed a period of drought and affected >325,000 people. Because mostagriculture is rain-fed and rural populations in many countries lack resources to moderate or adapt todrought, the agricultural sector is particularly vulnerable.The major findings for Africa of the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC confirm earlier reports,including a warming trend since the 1960s. In West Africa, rainfall has declined 20 percent to 40 percent,although the decline in the tropical rainforest zone has been only 4 percent. Despite advances in ourunderstanding of the complex mechanisms driving rainfall patterns, much uncertainty remains. Drought, amanifestation of extreme rainfall variability, has long been a feature of the continental West African climatewith severe and long-lasting impacts on natural and social systems. The decline in rainfall from the 1970s tothe 1990s, for example, caused a 25-35 km southward shift of the savanna zone (Sahelian, Sudanese, andGuinean savanna zones) with loss of grassland and woodland and displacement of human populations.Besides long-term climatic trends and extreme events, ecosystems in West Africa have been degraded byhuman activity which often interacts with climate. Major stressors (drivers of degradation) are deforestation,wildfire, and soil erosion in upland areas and overfishing in coastal areas. Here, we examine resource andsocial vulnerability.Climate change in conjunction with other destructive land use practices could accelerate desertification innorthern Ghana (north of about 10° N latitude). Rapid land use and land cover changes suggest the process iswell underway. Even so, further rainfall declines, coupled with increasing temperatures, would make much ofnorthern Ghana even more vulnerable to desertification. The vulnerabilities are simply magnified given a hostof biophysical and human related issues in the region (e.g., erosive rainfall, soil qualities and fertility, recurringdrought, low input decreased fallow period farming, deforestation, frequent hot bush fires, and overgrazing).Regardless of climate change effects being negative or positive, the continuance along the current humannaturalresource trajectory of population growth, over-exploitation, and overall extensive land degradation inthe desertification-prone zones of Ghana is clearly unsustainable. At best, the resilience and productivity ofmuch of the northern savanna zone will be progressively weakened and at worst those same areas, particularlythose in northern most Ghana, will succumb to desertification.GHANA CLIMATE CHANGE VULNERABILITY AND ADAPTATION ASSESSMENT 7