‘Landscapes approach’ could alleviate West Africa climate change woes – scientists
This article was first published on AlertNet
An integrated approach to land management ensuring sustainable policies could help agriculture-dependent West Africa cope with the looming effects of climate change, a panel of experts proposed.
Climate change is already affecting the livelihoods of West African smallholder farmers who rely on rain-fed agricultural techniques, and it is expected to make food shortages more acute as the region’s population continues to grow, said panelists at an event at the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF), on the sidelines of the recent U.N. climate talks in Warsaw, Poland.
Farmers in the region are trying to cope with irregular rainfall, flooding and degraded soil, and we must recognize the potential to reduce some of the effects of climate variability and change, said Robert Zougmoré, West Africa Regional Leader with the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).
“The West Africa region is very poor and vulnerable to all kinds of threats,” Zougmoré said. “The greater challenge is to increase agricultural production among resource-poor farmers while taking into consideration adaptation and without exacerbating environmental health — the two new dimensions of climate change.”
Read the full story by Julie Mollins on AlertNet.
Julie Mollins is a web journalist working for the Forests News blog in Bogor, Indonesia. Before joining the Center for International Forestry Research in March 2013, she worked for eight years at Reuters in Toronto and London.
