Climate Change

Several new country briefs for Africa south of the Sahara have recently been released by FAO’s Global Information and Early Warning Systems (GIEWS). The GIEWS country brief series provides an overview of the food security situation in prioritized countries, focusing on the current agricultural season, harvest prospects for staple food crops and livestock, estimates and forecasts of cereal production, and food price and food policy trends.

Agriculture in West Africa faces numerous challenges, including soil degradation, market instability, and significant threats from climate change. In response to these obstacles, many adaptation strategies, such as production of non-traditional crop varieties, have been encouraged. It remains less clear, however, what actually drives farmers’ decisions to adopt (or not adopt) these strategies. For example, a farmer may choose to plant a new crop variety in response to a short-term drought or as part of a longer term strategy to adapt to climate change.

According to the World Bank’s 2016 World Development Indicators (WDI) report , extreme poverty rates have fallen in Africa south of the Sahara over the last two decades, but not as quickly as in other regions. SSA’s extreme poverty rates declined from around 55 percent in 1990 to around 45 percent in 2012, while extreme poverty in South Asia fell from 51 percent to 19 percent during the same period. Globally, extreme poverty rates decreased from 37 percent in 1990 to 13 percent in 2012.

Rain-fed agriculture forms the mainstay of many West African economies, making the region particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change and weather variability.  As a result, there is growing emphasis being placed by both researchers and policymakers on climate-smart agriculture and climate change adaptation strategies to help protect the livelihoods and food security of farmers and rural households.

The World Bank, in collaboration with USAID, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), and CIAT, has continued its series on climate-smart agriculture (CSA) with a new country profile for Senegal . The profile takes an in-depth look at Senegal’s current agricultural and climate conditions and highlights several efforts that the Senegalese government is making to integrate climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies into its broader agricultural and economic development policy.