Institute of Development Studies

Changing climates, changing lives: Local voices and adaptation to climate change

17 June - Lars Otto Naess

Pastoral households in Ethiopia and Mali are finding it increasingly difficult to tackle current climate risks and meet their food and nutrition needs reveals a new report launched by IDS, Action Against Hunger and Tearfund. Authors of the report, which looks at perceptions of change among pastoralists and agropastoralists are calling for support to climate change adaptation to pay more attention to local level changes in household response strategies and inter-household support structures.

Implications for adaptation

The report makes a number of recommendations for NGOs, governments, donors and academia, such as to ensure policy coherence and balancing development goals that can help increase the resilience of pastoralists and agro-pastoralists. Underlying many of the recommendations is the need to pay more attention to current processes of change - the changing risks, changing responses and changing support structures at different levels - that together determine people's resilience to shocks and stressors. Access to new knowledge, technology and financial resources are necessary but not sufficient to adjust livelihoods, as people's responses, innovations and ability to adapt are often constrained by a range of structural and historical factors.

Key findings

Despite considerable differences between the two case study areas (Borana, Ethiopia and Gao and Mopti in Mali), there are examples of common features that can help inform adaptation support strategies.

First, respondents in both case study areas tell of changing patterns of risks, and the emergence of new ones affecting household food security. There is a clear perception of more uncertainty in rainfall patterns among respondents in both case studies. This echoes perceptions of change found in other parts of Africa. It is important to look at these perceptions in context, however. High spatial and temporal climate variability is very much part of life in these parts of the world. Pastoral and agro-pastoral systems exhibit important features that make them well suited to climate uncertainty and variability, including being adaptable and flexible.

Second is an increasing vulnerability to shocks and stressors as households' ability to respond to stressors changes. Some response strategies ‘lock' households into patterns of depleting assets, with knock-on effects on people's options to adapt over the long term. People have considerable knowledge and skills to adapt, often using innovative new solutions, but their ability to respond depends on a host of non-climatic factors that increases people's vulnerability. Examples are conflicts that restrict mobility and access to key resources, lack of access to markets and volatile food prices. These factors compromise responses to climate changes - both ‘normal' variability and shocks and changes in these.

Third, local inter-household support systems are changing, and so is people's ability to make use of them. The report shows that changes in locally available support - informal as well as formal - present new constraints as well as opportunities. The poorest groups often do not benefit from support available through traditional structures, such as gifts of livestock and food, and there are few vertical linkages that can help to lift people out of a state of chronic vulnerability. At the same time, institutional and cultural changes have, in some cases, created more opportunities, such as the emergence of local women's associations providing increased access to credit and markets.

Lars Otto Naess is a Research Fellow with the Vulnerability and Poverty Reduction Team

Photo taken by Samuel Hauenstein Swan