Climate and resilience blog posts

Mongolian herders are maintaining the centuries old practice of moving from season to season to find new grasslands for their livestock, the primary source of their nomadic livelihood. Right now it is time to move to their winter camps and enter the most critical period of the year – the months of extremely cold weather.

Deep into the mountains of Colombia’s coffee region, a producer uses his mobile phone to find out the daily reference price for a sack of dry parchment coffee. He will use that information to decide the best moment to sell his crop, a choice that could represent additional earnings. A choice he didn’t have just a few years ago.

There are still very few tools to assess the resilience of farmers, from the perspective of the farmers themselves. Over the past year, a group within FAO have been developing a tool to enable smallholder farmers and pastoralists to assess their own resilience while providing important data for scientists and policy makers’ efforts in climate adaptation.

During the recent Resilience 2014 Conference in Montpellier, one clear trend was evident: everyone has a game to play. Some presenters introduced the potential for behavior change among risk averse farmers through the use of games.

Variation in agricultural output, due to climatic shocks, is a significant source of risk in agriculture. Are men and women affected differently by climate risk? If so, do policies then need to specifically address women’s needs in addition to men’s needs?

A wide range of human activities leads to nitrogen and phosphorus emissions in water environments but agriculture is generally the main culprit. Anticipated agricultural intensification creates elevated concerns about the environmental consequences of agricultural nitrogen and phosphorus emissions in the future.

The homogenisation of global food supplies, and therefore of agricultural fields, makes agriculture more vulnerable to major threats like drought, insect pests and diseases, which are likely to become more severe as a result of climate change.

African smallholder farm families are amongst the world’s poorest because we have not invested enough in helping them bounce back after major shocks. Retooling smallholder farmers with productive assets is an imperative in building resilience.

In order to sustainably feed a growing population, agriculture must do better to protect its natural resource base. There is little doubt that technological advancement can bring about additional improvements in efficiency and environmental protection but how much is enough?

If WLE is promoting a new paradigm, where sustainability of agro-ecosystems constitutes the entry point for all agricultural development, what does this mean to a natural resources manager?

Managing a landscape begins much like a dance. But in integrated landscape management there are far more than two partners, and it is an ongoing challenge to balance different objectives and coordinate interests into one coherent set of activities.

From April 28 - May 31, 2014 the Agriculture and Ecosystems Blog will feature blog posts that focus on key resilience concepts in agricultural systems.