• Energy Research

AbstractWeather and climate services (WCS) are expected to improve the capacity of Africa's agricultural sector to manage the risks of climate variability and change. Despite this, a lack of evidence prevents a realistic analysis of whether such services are delivering on their potential. This paper reviews 66 studies that have evaluated outcomes and/or impacts of agricultural WCS in Africa, highlighting areas that have received relatively more attention as well as persistent gaps. While the evaluation of WCS outcomes is relatively straightforward, estimates of the number of people who access and use these services are uneven (covering a small number of communities in 23 of 54 African countries) and highly variable (with access estimates ranging from ~2 to 86%, depending on the service and the population). Meanwhile, 22 documents estimate the impact of WCS with respect to yields and/or income. Developed with a variety of methods, these estimates are also wide ranging and illustrate how impact is conditioned on a number of characteristics of the service, the user, and the context in which both operate. The paper uses lessons developed through this review to develop a “learning agenda,” or evidence‐building roadmap, to establish priorities that can guide work to improve the design, delivery, and impact of agricultural WCS in Africa. Priority learning areas include activities that can strengthen the evidence of access, use, and impacts of WCS, along with those that can advance the use and usability of evidence so as to improve the design and targeting of WCS services.This article is categorized under: Assessing Impacts of Climate Change > Evaluating Future Impacts of Climate Change Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Learning from Cases and Analogies

Most current approaches focused on vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation to climate change frame gender and its influence in a manner out-of-step with contemporary academic and international development research. The tendency to rely on analyses of the sex-disaggregated gender categories of 'men' and 'women' as sole or principal divisions explaining the abilities of different people within a group to adapt to climate change, illustrates this problem. This framing of gender persists in spite of established bodies of knowledge that show how roles and responsibilities that influence a person´s ability to deal with climate-induced and other stressors emerge at the intersection of diverse identity categories, including but not limited to gender, age, seniority, ethnicity, marital status, and livelihoods. Here, we provide a review of relevant literature on this topic and argue that approaching vulnerability to climate change through intersectional understandings of identity can help improve adaptation programming, project design, implementation, and outcomes.

The Working Group II contribution to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report states that effective adaptation to the changing climate will require transformational changes in how people live. This article explores the potential for climate services to catalyze and foster transformational adaptation. I argue that weather and climate information are not, in and of themselves, tools for transformation. When designed and delivered without careful identification of the intended users of the service and the needs that service addresses, they can fail to catalyze change amongst the users of that information. At worst, they can reinforce the status quo and drive maladaptive outcomes. For climate services to serve as agents of transformational adaptation, the climate services community will have to change how it understands the users of these services and their needs. Building climate services around contemporary understandings of how people make decisions about their lives and livelihoods offers designers and implementers of climate services opportunities to create services that catalyze transformational adaptation. These opportunities provide examples for the wider field of adaptation to consider in its efforts to contribute to climate resilient development.

This project collected quantitative data through a cross-sectional survey that aims to study the disruptive potential of migration on behavioural and attitudinal aspects of consumption and habit formation for sustainable practices. The data were collected in eight cities: Accra (Ghana), Dhaka (Bangladesh), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Brussels (Belgium), London (UK), Worcester (USA), Malmo (Sweden), and Maputo (Mozambique). The survey contains information on demographics, place of residence, place attachment, safe and trust, sustainable attitudes, and sustainable behaviours. In addition, data from Accra and Dhaka also contains life histories (i.e. retrospective data on demographics, migration history, place attachment, and safe and trust).

Abstract Agricultural land reforms are crucial to promote investments in sustainable land management and food production amidst accelerating urbanization and increasing population growth. However, notable gaps remain in the literature regarding how land reforms designed at the national level are implemented in localized contexts, especially as they interplay with customary tenure regimes. Adopting an institutional bricolage perspective, we explore interactions between local tenure arrangements and government land reforms and the resulting implications for food production in rural Mali. We show that specific market-based land tenure arrangements in the study area emerged from a combination of urbanization pressures and government-designed land reform. We find that tenure security is linked to agricultural investment decisions, as also documented by previous studies. We likewise show that anxieties and ambiguities stemming from state-mandated land registration foster the emergence of monetized forms of access to collective land. These new market-based systems drive greater out-migration of productive community members, leading to labour shortages and weakening the social cohesion and mutual support systems upon which the most vulnerable depend. The findings show that top-down land reforms in rural Mali lead to disruptions of the social fabric, along with re-organizations of tenure systems to accommodate social norms and priorities. We illustrate how, in the context of centralized policy making with limited local consultation, community members resist cooperating and creatively search for alternatives to achieve their social goals. Empirical investigations of socio-institutional challenges such as land tenure arrangements are critical for effective scaling of agricultural innovations and sustainable food production.

We consider the question of what is needed for climate services to support sub-Saharan African farmers' adaptation needs at the scale of the climate challenge. Consistent with an earlier assessment that mutually reinforcing supply-side and demand-side capacity constraints impede the development of effective climate services in Africa, our discussion of strategies for scaling up practices that meet farmers' needs, and opportunities to address long-standing obstacles, is organized around: (a) meeting farmers' climate information needs; (b) supporting access, understanding and use; and (c) co-production of services. A widespread gap between available information and farmers' needs is associated with entrenched seasonal forecast convention and obstacles to using observational data. Scalable innovations for producing more locally relevant historical and forecast climate information for farm decision-making are beginning to be adopted. Structured participatory communication processes help farmers relate complex climate information to their experience, and integrate it into their management decisions. Promising efforts to deliver rural climate services strategically combine communication channels that include participatory processes embedded in existing agricultural advisory systems, and innovations in interactive broadcast media. Efforts to engage farmers in co-production of climate services improve delivery to farmers and dialogue among stakeholders, but often with little impact on the usability of available information. We discuss challenges and options for capturing farmers' evolving demands, and aggregating and incorporating this information into iterative improvements to climate services at a national scale. We find evidence that key weaknesses in the supply and the demand sides of climate services continue to reinforce each other to impede progress toward meeting farmers' needs at scale across Africa. Six recommendations target these weaknesses: (1) change the way seasonal forecasts are produced and presented regionally and nationally, (2) use merged gridded data as a foundation for national climate information products, (3) remove barriers to using historical data as a public good, (4) mobilize those who work on the demand side of climate services as an effective community of practice, (5) collectively assess and improve tools and processes for communicating climate information with rural communities, and (6) build iterative co-production processes into national climate service frameworks.

Abstract Non-technical summary We identify a set of essential recent advances in climate change research with high policy relevance, across natural and social sciences: (1) looming inevitability and implications of overshooting the 1.5°C warming limit, (2) urgent need for a rapid and managed fossil fuel phase-out, (3) challenges for scaling carbon dioxide removal, (4) uncertainties regarding the future contribution of natural carbon sinks, (5) intertwinedness of the crises of biodiversity loss and climate change, (6) compound events, (7) mountain glacier loss, (8) human immobility in the face of climate risks, (9) adaptation justice, and (10) just transitions in food systems. Technical summary The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports provides the scientific foundation for international climate negotiations and constitutes an unmatched resource for researchers. However, the assessment cycles take multiple years. As a contribution to cross- and interdisciplinary understanding of climate change across diverse research communities, we have streamlined an annual process to identify and synthesize significant research advances. We collected input from experts on various fields using an online questionnaire and prioritized a set of 10 key research insights with high policy relevance. This year, we focus on: (1) the looming overshoot of the 1.5°C warming limit, (2) the urgency of fossil fuel phase-out, (3) challenges to scale-up carbon dioxide removal, (4) uncertainties regarding future natural carbon sinks, (5) the need for joint governance of biodiversity loss and climate change, (6) advances in understanding compound events, (7) accelerated mountain glacier loss, (8) human immobility amidst climate risks, (9) adaptation justice, and (10) just transitions in food systems. We present a succinct account of these insights, reflect on their policy implications, and offer an integrated set of policy-relevant messages. This science synthesis and science communication effort is also the basis for a policy report contributing to elevate climate science every year in time for the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Social media summary We highlight recent and policy-relevant advances in climate change research – with input from more than 200 experts.