This project will address three acute research needs identified by the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report: understanding the relationship between climatic variability and human adaptation; examining the "more detailed local-level analyses of the role of multiple interacting factors, including development activities and climate risk-reduction in the African context"; and regional studies "focusing on future options and pathways for adaptation." The research objective is to better understand adaptation to climate change as a coupled human/biophysical process, taking seriously both qualitative understandings of local livelihoods and adaptation informed by cutting-edge social theory. This project's research methods will include the development of regional climate models for southern Africa. Once these climate models have been tested and verified, the research team will then compile a database of meteorological and economic data so that the PIs can match their climate scenarios with years in the past that have a similar weather profile (drought, floods, etc). The results from these modeling efforts will then be presented to local farming communities to gauge changes that they might undertake given the climate scenarios and the ways in which they have previously adapted to climatic and economic variability. The outcome of these iterative, mixed methods will be an understanding of adaptation and its biophysical impacts will provide greatly refined data to inform regional and sub-regional scenario and modeling efforts integral to future adaptation and development planning.
This project represents a novel approach to studying a complex scientific problem: the impacts of climate change on vulnerable human populations. Where many see quantitative efforts to understand and model climate change and its biophysical impacts and qualitative studies of livelihoods change and adaptation to these impacts as incommensurable, the proposed research will link social-theoretically informed, qualitatively-based research on livelihoods and adaptation to modeled biophysical processes via quantifiable measures of adaptation allowing for both attention to local particularity and the generalization of research findings to inform broader scientific understandings and policy development. With respect to broader societal impacts, the investigators expect this project to contribute to three main areas, namely, the strengthening of National Adaptation Programme of Action in the three countries, the offering of short courses at the partnering African universities, and the hands on training of U.S. and African Ph.D. students through close contact during field research trips. This project is jointly supported by the NSF Geography and Spatial Sciences Program and the NSF Office of International Science and Engineering.
The conditions under which the poorest of the poor will experience the effects of climatic and environmental change are subject to intense scrutiny. In southeastern Malawi, where this research was conducted, rural households are highly dependent on their local land resources for both their income and subsistence. One of the ten "highly indebted poor countries", Malawian households face formidable challenges. The start of the rainy season is growing increasingly erratic and the intensity of rainfall in the rainy season is increasing at the same time that the frequency of devastating dry spells are increasing. An important gap in scientific knowledge about the impacts of climate change on highly vulnerable human populations is how people will adapt to impending environmental and climate change. Addressing this problem was the overall goal of this research. This research examined how livelihood systems interact with land use systems under conditions of change. This project had three objectives: first, to develop and test a method for determining how past responses to climatic variation in southeast Africa might be utilized in future adaptation to climate change and; second, to test a transect approach to collecting data. A transect approach is one where data is collected along a line from remote poor rural villages across different socio-economic and environmental zones to an end point in a major urban area. Finally, the last objective was to develop a set of intervening variables that disrupts the relationship between changes in climate and immediate human response. This project met or exceeded all three of these goals. The main findings of this study are relevant for the academic, policy making and public communities. First, the project found that it is possible to map and analyze rural livelihoods and land use patterns using advanced spatial statistics. These statistics show whether or not one type of income activity is related to another in geographic space. For instance, the research has answered questions such as "is the location of crop production related to the consumption of forest products" and "do households nearer to forests use forest products to adapt to climate change"? One finding of particular interest is that tobacco crop income is strongly related to forest income in the Central Region (see attached figure). When this was presented to development decision makers in September 2014, there was intense interest in this finding. Questions were raised about whether or not crop production was contributing to deforestation in the country. A second finding was that households will draw upon past coping strategies to adapt to future environmental and climate changes, but those strategies are very weak. For instance, a sharp spike in the price of fuel will cause hardships greater than people’s ability to cope. The research generated a list of such issues, called "intervening variables". Finally, this research showed that households are overly reliant on land-based production (for income and subsistence) thus leaving them highly vulnerable to any event or long-term change that affects a change in land productivity. The broader impacts of this research were significant. First, twenty students were trained in advanced social science research in developing world contexts. One undergraduate student went on to be awarded two fellowships and a graduate student was later awarded an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Award. Both of these students credited their experience in the field with the principal investigator for their successes. Three graduate students were trained. One has already received her PhD and two others will graduate in 2014. Second, the principal investigator has been is direct and continuing contact with development decision-makers at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) communicating the findings of this research. Decision makers in Malawi are using the findings to reassess their some of their development programs for the country. In addition, USAID has funded follow-up research to assist them in their development programs. The intellectual merits of the study are many, but the most significant is that we are now able to demonstrate how to examine livelihood systems in space, we understand how past coping strategies will be used to adapt to future changes and that they are weak, and finally that livelihood strategies are limited by an over reliance on land-based income and subsistence production. In summary, the main outcomes were: a much better understanding of how rural, highly vulnerable people in Malawi will adapt to climate change, training of twenty-three (23) US students throught their participation in field data collection in Malawi, and sharing of results with another Federal Agency that can implement/learn from the results of this study.
