impacts

UNFCCC
CLIMATE CHANGE: IMPACTS, VULNERABILITIES
AND ADAPTATION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE
In Latin America, examples of adaption activities include a
GEF funded project in Ecuador which collaborates with the
Waorani and Timpoca communities to create a sustainable
management plan of raising palms and frogs to earn
income. In Brazil, SouthSouthNorth have a number of
adaptation projects which are helping agricultural
productivity, reforestation and recovery of degraded land.
In SIDS, adaptation has mostly been taking place through
individual, ad-hoc actions on a local scale. For example,
placing concrete blocks on the top of zinc roofs to prevent
the roofs from being blown away during hurricanes has
become common practice in Jamaica since Hurricane Ivan.
In Vanuatu, SPREP, with funding from the Canadian
government, has moved 100 villagers living in the Lateu
settlement to higher ground 600 m from the coast and
15 m above current sea level (UNFCCC 2007a).
A recent analysis of completed, ongoing or planned
adaptation projects that have adaptation as a stated
objective, and for which information is publicly available,
was undertaken by the UNFCCC secretariat. This list is
relatively short, only about 180 identified projects have
been identified so far.
Despite all positive efforts in the assessment of vulnerability
and adaptation, the movement from adaptation
assessment and planning to implementation is not well
developed. At the regional workshops and expert
meeting on adaptation, it was pointed out that, whereas
a number of countries have well-developed adaptation
plans or are in the process of finalising them, many more
resources are needed for implementation. The Andean
Community of Nations, for example, developed an
adaptation plan in 2004, but no concrete actions have
been taken so far towards its implementation (UNFCCC
2006d). A lot of projects being implemented at the
moment deal with capacity-building for adaptation. The
lessons learnt from these need to be communicated
at every level. The national communications and NAPAs
highlight a large number of priority adaptation
options. It is important now to enable and fund the
implementation of these plans and projects.
5.2 LOCAL COPING STRATEGIES
There is a large body of knowledge and experience within
local communities on coping with climatic variability and
extreme weather events. Local communities have
always aimed to adapt to variations in their climate. To do
so, they have made preparations based on their resources
and their knowledge accumulated through experience of
past weather patterns. This includes times when they
have also been forced to react to and recover from extreme
events, such as floods, drought and hurricanes.
Local coping strategies are an important element of planning
for adaptation. Climate change is leading communities
to experience climatic extremes more frequently, as well
as new climate conditions and extremes. Traditional
knowledge can help to provide efficient, appropriate and
time-tested ways of advising and enabling adaptation
to climate change in communities who are feeling the
effects of climate changes due to global warming. Several
examples of local coping strategies are mentioned in
the background papers to the workshops (UNFCCC 2006b,
2006c, 2007a, 2007b).
In Africa rural farmers have been practicing a range
of agricultural techniques as coping strategies and tactics
to enable sustainable food production and deal with
extreme events. These include intercropping and crop
diversification; use of home gardens, diversification of herds
and incomes, such as the introduction of sheep in place
of goats in the Bara province in Western Sudan, pruning
and fertilizing to double tree densities and prevent soil
erosion in semi-arid areas, e.g. Senegal, Burkina Faso,
Madagascar and Zimbabwe; manipulation of land use
leading to land use conversion, e.g. a shift from livestock
farming to game farming in Southern Africa; water
conservation techniques to cope with arid conditions such
as the Zaï technique in Burkina Faso: farmers dig pits
in the soil to collect organic material carried by the wind
during the dry season, at the start of the rainy season
farmers add organic matter from animals which attracts
termite activity resulting in termite tunnels that can collect
rain deep enough that it doesn’t evaporate, and thus
increasing soil fertility. In many locations tribal and
individual movements and migration are also identified
as adaptation options.
In Asia, farmers have traditionally observed a number
of practices to adapt to climate variability, for example
intercropping, mixed cropping, agro-forestry, animal
husbandry, and developing new seed varieties to cope
with local climate. Various water use and conservation
strategies include terracing, surface water and groundwater
irrigation; and diversification in agriculture to deal with
drought. Structural and non-structural measures are used
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