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Climate change and variability are significant challenges for the environment and food security worldwide. Development strategies focusing simultaneously on adaptive farming, productivity, and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions-known as climate-smart agriculture (CSA) strategies-are key to responding to these challenges. For almost a decade, within the framework of Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), World Agroforestry (ICRAF), and its partners have been using Participatory Action Research (PAR) to fully engage key stakeholders in co-creating such CSA development strategies. This includes the testing of Agricultural Research for Development (AR4D) CSA scalability options. The multidisciplinary teams include the National Research and Extension Systems (NARES), national meteorological services (NMS), non-profit organizations (NGOs), and local radio programs, among others. The CCAFS-West Africa Program, World Agroforestry-West and Central Africa (ICRAF-WCA), International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), University of Reading, and Centre Régional de Formation et d'Application en Agro-météorologie et Hydrologie Opérationnelle (AGRHYMET) provide technical backstopping to the national teams. Climate information (CI) was used as an entry point to inform the development of CSA technologies and practices within Climate-Smart Villages (CSV). This groundwork has led to a greater understanding of three critical factors for successful CSV implementation: (1) Building strong partnerships to co-design and develop agricultural systems that improve ecosystem and population resilience, (2) Key stakeholders (researchers, farmers, development agents, and students) capacity strengthening through vocational and academic training, and (3) Using CI for livelihood planning at all scales. These three factors support more effective identification and testing of agricultural technologies and practices addressing climate variability and change at plot, community, and landscape levels. This paper discusses the PAR-CSA methodology and parameters for evaluation, including biophysical and social change. Keys to success, including communication, knowledge sharing tools, and scalability are also discussed. Finally, future opportunities for improvement are presented, including knowledge product development, CSA policy and investment planning, capacity building, further engagement of the private sector, and additional research on existing practices and tools.

La zone soudano-sahélienne de l'Afrique de l'Ouest a connu des sécheresses récurrentes depuis le milieu des années 1970 et aujourd'hui, on s'inquiète beaucoup de la façon dont cette région sera en mesure de s'adapter au changement climatique futur. Pour développer des stratégies d'adaptation bien ciblées, l'importance relative des facteurs climatiques en tant que moteurs de l'utilisation des terres et du changement des moyens de subsistance doit être mieux comprise. Sur la base des perceptions de 1 249 ménages dans cinq pays à travers un gradient annuel de précipitations de 400 à 900 mm, nous fournissons une estimation de la le poids des facteurs climatiques en tant que facteurs de changement dans les ménages ruraux au cours des 20 dernières années. Les facteurs climatiques, principalement des précipitations insuffisantes, sont perçus par 30 à 50 % des ménages comme une cause de diminution de la production de cultures pluviales, tandis qu'un large éventail d'autres facteurs explique les 50 à 70 % restants. Les facteurs climatiques sont beaucoup moins importants pour la diminution de la production animale et des zones de pâturage. L'augmentation des pâturages est également observée et causée par l'amélioration du régime foncier dans la zone la plus sèche. Les stratégies d'adaptation à la baisse de la production agricole comprennent la « prière » et la migration dans la zone de 400 à 500 mm ; le reboisement, la migration et le gouvernement soutien dans la zone 500-700 mm ; et amélioration des sols dans la zone 700-900 mm. Le déclin des exploitations d'élevage est contré par l'amélioration des ressources fourragères et des services vétérinaires. Il est conclu que, bien que la production de cultures pluviales soit principalement limitée par des facteurs climatiques, le bétail et les pâturages sont moins sensibles au climat dans toutes les zones de précipitations. Cela doit être reflété dans les stratégies nationales d'adaptation dans la région. La zona sudanosaheliana de África occidental ha experimentado sequías recurrentes desde mediados de la década de 1970 y hoy en día existe una preocupación considerable sobre cómo esta región podrá adaptarse al cambio climático futuro. Para desarrollar estrategias de adaptación bien dirigidas, es necesario comprender mejor la importancia relativa de los factores climáticos como impulsores del uso de la tierra y el cambio de los medios de vida. Sobre la base de las percepciones de 1249 hogares en cinco países con un gradiente de lluvia anual de 400-900 mm, proporcionamos una estimación de la el peso de los factores climáticos como impulsores de los cambios en los hogares rurales durante los últimos 20 años. Los factores climáticos, principalmente las precipitaciones inadecuadas, son percibidos por el 30-50% de los hogares como una causa de la disminución de la producción de cultivos de secano, mientras que una amplia gama de otros factores explica el 50-70% restante. Los factores climáticos son mucho menos importantes para la disminución de la producción ganadera y las áreas de pastoreo. Los aumentos en los pastos también se observan y son causados por la mejora de la tenencia en la zona más seca. Las estrategias de adaptación a la disminución de la producción de cultivos incluyen la "oración" y la migración en la zona de 400-500 mm; reforestación, migración y gobierno apoyo en la zona de 500-700 mm; y mejora del suelo en la zona de 700-900 mm. La disminución de las explotaciones ganaderas se contrarresta con la mejora de los recursos forrajeros y los servicios veterinarios. Se concluye que, aunque la producción de cultivos de secano está limitada principalmente por factores climáticos, el ganado y los pastos son menos sensibles al clima en todas las zonas de lluvia. Esto debe reflejarse en las estrategias nacionales de adaptación en la región. The Sudano-Sahelian zone of West Africa has experienced recurrent droughts since the mid-1970s and today there is considerable concern for how this region will be able to adapt to future climate change.To develop well targeted adaptation strategies, the relative importance of climate factors as drivers of land use and livelihood change need to be better understood.Based on the perceptions of 1249 households in five countries across an annual rainfall gradient of 400-900 mm, we provide an estimate of the relative weight of climate factors as drivers of changes in rural households during the past 20 years.Climate factors, mainly inadequate rainfall, are perceived by 30-50% of households to be a cause of decreasing rainfed crop production, whereas a wide range of other factors explains the remaining 50-70%.Climate factors are much less important for decreasing livestock production and pasture areas.Increases in pasture are also observed and caused by improved tenure in the driest zone.Adaptation strategies to declining crop production include 'prayer' and migration in the 400-500 mm zone; reforestation, migration, and government support in the 500-700 mm zone; and soil improvement in the 700-900 mm zone.Declining livestock holdings are countered by improved fodder resources and veterinary services.It is concluded that although rainfed crop production is mainly constrained by climate factors, livestock and pasture are less climate sensitive in all rainfall zones.This needs to be reflected in national adaptation strategies in the region. شهدت المنطقة السودانية الساحلية في غرب إفريقيا موجات جفاف متكررة منذ منتصف السبعينيات، واليوم هناك قلق كبير بشأن كيفية قدرة هذه المنطقة على التكيف مع تغير المناخ في المستقبل. لوضع استراتيجيات تكيف موجهة بشكل جيد، يجب فهم الأهمية النسبية للعوامل المناخية كمحركات لاستخدام الأراضي وتغير سبل العيش بشكل أفضل. بناءً على تصورات 1249 أسرة في خمسة بلدان عبر تدرج هطول الأمطار السنوي من 400-900 ملم، نقدم تقديرًا للنسبة وزن العوامل المناخية كمحركات للتغيرات في الأسر الريفية خلال السنوات العشرين الماضية. ينظر إلى العوامل المناخية، وخاصة عدم كفاية هطول الأمطار، من قبل 30-50 ٪ من الأسر على أنها سبب لانخفاض إنتاج المحاصيل البعلية، في حين أن مجموعة واسعة من العوامل الأخرى تفسر 50-70 ٪ المتبقية. العوامل المناخية أقل أهمية بكثير لانخفاض إنتاج الثروة الحيوانية ومناطق المراعي. كما لوحظت الزيادات في المراعي والناجمة عن تحسين الحيازة في المنطقة الأكثر جفافاً. تشمل استراتيجيات التكيف مع انخفاض إنتاج المحاصيل "الصلاة" والهجرة في منطقة 400-500 مم ؛ إعادة التشجير والهجرة والحكومة الدعم في منطقة 500-700 مم ؛ وتحسين التربة في منطقة 700-900 مم. يتم مواجهة انخفاض حيازات الماشية من خلال تحسين موارد الأعلاف والخدمات البيطرية. تم التوصل إلى أنه على الرغم من أن إنتاج المحاصيل البعلية مقيد بشكل أساسي بعوامل المناخ، إلا أن الثروة الحيوانية والمراعي أقل حساسية للمناخ في جميع مناطق هطول الأمطار. يجب أن ينعكس هذا في استراتيجيات التكيف الوطنية في المنطقة.

This paper synthesizes a set of national case studies conducted in the Sahelian countries during 2019-2020 as a collaboration between national universities and research institutes, and the Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, with contributions from the Agrhymet Regional Centre, Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS). These case studies provide up-to-date knowledge and critical insights on the nexus of land degradation, climate change and energy in the Sahel. The current synthesis paper highlights their major findings and provides crosscutting and cross-regional analytical conclusions. First, the synthesis paper explores current trends in the Sahel region on land use and land degradation, energy use and supply, climate change projections and impacts, as well as their interactions and links to agricultural growth, food security, poverty reduction, and peace in the region. Second, technological, socio-economic and policy solutions at the nexus of land, water, energy and climate challenges that enable environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive rural development in the Sahel are discussed, including their interactions and implications for peace and stability in the region. The findings show that such socio-economic solutions as improving access to markets, strengthening social safety nets, increasing investments to transport and energy infrastructures, promoting land tenure security, expanding off-farm employment opportunities can greatly contribute to rural development in the Sahel, particularly by aiding climate change resilience and sustainable land management. Key technological innovations highlighted across the case studies include expanding irrigation and adopting water use efficient irrigation techniques, crop diversification, expanding agricultural mechanization, investing into restoring and rehabilitating degraded lands through reforestation, afforestation and agroforestry practices. The key lessons learnt from ongoing national policy initiatives for sustainable development highlight the importance of active stakeholder consultation and participation in policy formulation, institution of effective policy monitoring and assessment mechanisms, and avoiding of excessive reliance on external sources of funding for the successful implementation of sustainable development policies and programs. Based on these findings, the synthesis paper proposes an agenda for applied research to provide guidance to and accompany promising development strategies in and for the region.

In the last decade, sub-Saharan African countries have taken various measures to plan for and adapt to floods in order to reduce exposure and its impacts on human health, livelihoods, and infrastructure. Measuring the effects of such initiatives on social resilience is challenging as it requires to combine multiple variables and indicators that embrace thematic, spatial, and temporal dimensions inherent to the resilience thinking and concept. In this research, we apply a subjective resilience indicator framework and a before-after-control-intervention (BACI) evaluation to empirically measure the impacts of the “Live with Water” (LWW) project on suburban households in Dakar, Senegal. Our framework is based on an empirically measurable resilience index that combines anticipatory, adaptive, and absorptive capacity—considered as structural dimensions—with the concept of transformative capacity—considered as a temporal reconfiguration of the first three dimensions. Our finding let us estimate that the project increased the absorptive and the anticipatory capacities by 10.6% and 4.6%, respectively. However, adaptive capacity remained unchanged. This may be explained by the fact that the project was more successful in building drainage and physical infrastructures, rather than improving multi-level organizations and strategies to cope with existing flood events. Decoupling implementation time between physical infrastructures and longer term institutional and livelihood based support could both improve projects’ results and their evaluations.

AbstractIt is almost 6 years since the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted, and countries have less than 10 years to achieve the set targets. Unlike most of the world, sub-Saharan African countries have reported only minimal progress, one that the COVID-19 pandemic has unfortunately disrupted. Transdisciplinary research (TDR) has been conceptualized as important for achieving sustainability goals such as the SDGs. In this paper we (i) analyze the contributions of the five TDR projects toward the achievements of the SDGs at the city level in Africa, and (ii) explore the interactions between the assessed SDGs across the five projects. The projects’ contributions towards the achievements of the SDGs were examined in three thematic areas: (i) contexts, (ii) processes and (iii) products. The five projects were funded under the Leading Integrated Research for Agenda 2030 in Africa (LIRA) programme. The projects were being implemented in nine cities across five African countries Accra (Ghana), Kumasi (Ghana), Korhogo (Ivory Coast), Abuja Metro (Nigeria), Mbour (Senegal), Cape Town (South Africa), Nelson Mandela Bay Metro (South Africa), Grahamstown (South Africa) and Kampala (Uganda) and data were collected on each of the five projects in these cities. The contextual contributions include co-analysis and reflection on policy and institutional silos and social innovations amenable to contextual complexity. A shift in how actors perceived and conceptualized sustainability challenges and the role of the projects as transformative social agents constituted the two main process contributions. Tool development, virtual models and maps, and handbook are the product contributions by the projects. Our analysis of the SDG interactions indicated the need for cross-sectoral collaborations to ensures resource use efficiency, knowledge and experience sharing, and seamless flow of information and data to accelerate the SDG implementation.

The increasing global human population is projected to reach 9.7 billion people by 2050. This population growth is currently linked to the trends of world-wide urbanization, growth of megacities and shifting dietary patterns. While humankind faces the daunting challenge of feeding and providing healthy lives for its teeming populations, urban agriculture holds promise for improving the quality of life in cities. Fortunately, policymakers and planners are accepting the need to support peri-urban farmers to increase the resilience of food systems while efficiently managing already strained natural resources. We argue that for urban agriculture to significantly increase food yields, it is crucial to adopt a One Health approach to agriculture and environmental stewardship. Here, we propose six nature-based and climate-smart approaches to accelerate the transition toward more sustainable food systems. These approaches include reducing the reliance on synthetic agricultural inputs, increasing biodiversity through producing locally adapted crops and livestock breeds, using probiotics and postbiotics, and adopting portable digital decision-support systems. Such radical approaches to transforming food production will require cross-sectoral stakeholder engagement at international, national, and community levels to protect biodiversity and the environment whilst ensuring sustainable and nutritious diets that are culturally acceptable, accessible, and affordable for all.

Hygiene is the most useful public health measure for preventing infections of important endemic and emerging diseases of global significance. This study aimed to assess the impact of these public health preventive measures on dirty hand diseases. A retrospective survey was conducted in the rural general hospitals of Taabo (south-central Côte d’Ivoire) and Marcory (urban Abidjan) to collect clinical data on dirty hand diseases in the patients’ records from 2013 to 2020. In addition, focus group discussions (N = 8) were conducted in the communities in both settings to identify the sociocultural and economic hindering or fostering factors that affected the adoption of and the compliance with handwashing and disinfection practices. A total of 3245 and 8154 patients’ records were examined in the general hospitals of Taabo and Marcory, respectively. Compared with women, men were more affected by typhoid fever (OR, 0.68 [95%CI, 0.53–0.88]) and influenza (OR, 0.87 [95%CI, 0.75–1]). Hygiene measures promoted during Ebola and COVID-19 outbreaks had no impact on the prevalence of typhoid fever in both settings; however, a positive impact was observed regarding influenza infections. Populations were aware of the importance of handwashing for public health but had difficulties adhering due to financial constraints, access to drinking water, and the absence or scarcity of handwashing facilities.

The 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer a blueprint for global peace and prosperity, while conserving natural ecosystems and resources for the planet. However, factors such as climate-induced weather extremes and other High-Impact Low-Probability (HILP) events on their own can devastate lives and livelihoods. When a pandemic affects us, as COVID-19 has, any concurrent hazards interacting with it highlight additional challenges to disaster and emergency management worldwide. Such amplified effects contribute to greater societal and environmental risks, with cross-cutting impacts and exposing inequities. Hence, understanding how a pandemic affects the management of concurrent hazards and HILP is vital in disaster risk reduction practice. This study reviews the contemporary literature and utilizes data from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) to unpack how multiple extreme events have interacted with the coronavirus pandemic and affected the progress in achieving the SDGs. This study is especially urgent, given the multidimensional societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic amidst climate change. Results indicate that mainstreaming risk management into development planning can mitigate the adverse effects of disasters. Successes in addressing compound risks have helped us understand the value of new technologies, such as the use of drones and robots to limit human exposure. Enhancing data collection efforts to enable inclusive sentinel systems can improve surveillance and effective response to future risk challenges. Stay-at-home policies put in place during the pandemic for virus containment have highlighted the need to holistically consider the built environment and socio-economic exigencies when addressing the pandemic’s physical and mental health impacts, and could also aid in the context of increasing climate-induced extreme events. As we have seen, such policies, services, and technologies, along with good nutrition, can significantly help safeguard health and well-being in pandemic times, especially when simultaneously faced with ubiquitous climate-induced extreme events. In the final decade of SDG actions, these measures may help in efforts to “Leave No One Behind”, enhance human–environment relations, and propel society to embrace sustainable policies and lifestyles that facilitate building back better in a post-pandemic world. Concerted actions that directly target the compounding effects of different interacting hazards should be a critical priority of the Sendai Framework by 2030.

Abstract This paper examines the causal relationship between exporting and productivity in the manufacturing firms in Senegal using a unique firm-level panel data for the period 1998-2011. We control for endogeneity and sample selection by jointly estimating the productivity and the export-participation equations. Our results indicate strong evidence of both self-selection of the most efficient firms enter into the export market and effect of Learning in the export market. Findings show that firms with better financial health are likely to exports. Furthermore, the ownership of intangible assets like brevet and the quality of labour positively affect the probability to export of the manufacturing firms. We investigate the sectoral heterogeneity of the Learning-by exporting effect (LBE) and find evidence of a weak heterogeneity of the learning-by-exporting effect between the sectors. From a policy relevance, the evidence of learning-by-exporting suggests Senegal has much to gain from encouraging exports by helping domestic firms to overcome the barriers to enter into foreign markets by promoting access to intangible assets like brevet. Particularly, export promotion policies could be helpful, reducing the level of financial constraints faced by firms and indirectly enhancing their investment spending and productivity. As a driver of manufacturing exports, labour quality must be carefully considered in the perspectives of industrial development. Considerable efforts are required in the Senegalese educational system in order to match the training to the requirements of the labour market.