Adaptation to climate change in Africa: Challenges and opportunities identified from Ethiopia

Abstract

Africa is widely held to be highly vulnerable to future climate change and Ethiopia is often cited as one of the most extreme examples. With this in mind we seek to identify entry points to integrate short- to medium-term climate risk reduction within development activities in Africa, drawing from experiences in Ethiopia. To achieve this we employ a range of data and methods. We examine the changing nature of climate risks using analysis of recent climate variability, future climate scenarios and their secondary impacts. We assess the effects of climate variability on agricultural production and national GDP. Entry points and knowledge gaps in relation to mainstreaming climate risks in Ethiopia are identified using the Government's plan for poverty reduction. We end with a case study incorporating climate risks through drought insurance within the current social protection programme in Ethiopia, which provides support to 8.3 million people.

Rainfall behaviour in Ethiopia shows no marked emergent changes and future climate projections show continued warming but very mixed patterns of rainfall change. Economic analysis highlights sensitivities within the economy to large-scale drought, however, while the effects are clear in major drought years in other years the relationship is weak. For social protection fairly small positive and negative effects on the number of recipients and frequency of cash payments during drought occur under the extreme range of climate model rainfall projections (2020s).

Our analysis highlights several important challenges and opportunities for addressing climate risks. Challenges primarily relate to the large uncertainties in climate projections for parts of Africa, a weak evidence base of complex, often non-deterministic, climate–society interactions and institutional issues. Opportunities relate to the potential for low-regrets measures to reduce vulnerability to current climate variability which can be integrated with relatively modest effort within a shift in Africa from a disaster-focused view of climate to a long-term perspective that emphasises livelihood security and vulnerability reduction.

Introduction

Africa is widely held to be highly vulnerable to future climate change and Ethiopia is often cited as one of the most extreme examples, with reference to the famines of the 1980s to warn of the disasters that may result from anthropogenic climate change. However, crop failure alone cannot account for such an extreme outcome; many interacting factors contribute to the complex nature of vulnerability to climate shocks. Policy responses must aim to straddle institutional, social and ecological realties while simultaneously grappling with the extreme poverty found in Ethiopia, and many other African countries.

Ethiopia's economy is highly exposed to climate variability and extremes. Agriculture forms the basis of the economy supporting roughly 42% GDP and 85% employment (Byerlee et al., 2007). The nature of Ethiopia's agriculture, primarily rain-fed, means that production is sensitive to fluctuations in rainfall. Chronic food insecurity affects 10% of the population; even in average rainfall years these households cannot meet their food needs and rely partly on food assistance. Drought may result in sharp reductions in agricultural output and reliant employment, and may have additional multiplier effects on the monetary economy (Benson and Clay, 1998). It also has profound social impacts. The greatest loss of life associated with drought in Ethiopia occurred in 1984, 1974 and 1973, while the greatest number of affected people was 14.2 million in 2002 (over 20% of total population; World Bank, 2007).

The link between climate and Ethiopia's economy is encapsulated in Fig. 1 showing rainfall variability and GDP growth over time for Ethiopia (World Bank, 2006). The figure has been widely used to infer close links between rainfall and GDP and to emphasise the effects of climate on Ethiopia's macroeconomic development. Grey and Sadoff (2007), however, note that this association does not necessarily prove causality. Food insecurity is a chronic complex emergency that stems from political, social, environmental and cultural sources. The social construction of emergencies in Ethiopia is reinforced by the frequent recurrence of socio-economic drought even when there is no meteorological drought (Smakhtin and Schipper, 2008). Despite the prevalent view of Ethiopia's high sensitivity, there have only been a few attempts to quantify the economic impacts of climate variability/extremes in Ethiopia (Demeke, 2004, Dercon, 2004, Deressa, 2006, Block et al., 2006, World Bank, 2006, Yesuf and Kassie, 2007). This deficit extends to many other parts of Africa, although with some exceptions, e.g. Benson and Clay (1998) and Jury (2003).

World Bank (2006) is notable for its use of a novel approach to quantify the economy-wide impacts of hydrological variability in Ethiopia, which is unlike general equilibrium economic models that assume average rainfall over a long period. Instead, their model was run with three rainfall assumptions: smoothed or average rainfall; stylised drought (captures single drought shock); and historical variability. The results thus allow for more sophisticated analysis, and show the importance of better models for decision making. Outputs demonstrated that considering the effects of water variability reduced projected rates of economic growth by 38% per year and increased projected poverty rates by 25% over a 12-year period. Consideration of variability added value to water investments, such as irrigation, because it shows that water storage is crucial at certain times. Such non-equilibrium approaches to the economic effects of climate variability are highly appropriate to the climate change problem but are only just beginning to be employed in Africa.

Disentangling the relationship between climate variability and development trends is an enormous challenge, especially when historical weather data are scarce and difficult to interpret. However, this is critical for understanding the role that climate plays within society and where and what type of interventions may be appropriate to address adaptation. The mainstreaming of climate risks into development programmes includes development of methods (Klein et al., 2001), pilot applications and more routine screening processes. Mainstreaming means to incorporate and integrate certain concerns into existing or planned policies and institutions. The concept of mainstreaming originates in development policy, in reaction to the omission of certain specific concerns that were so cross-cutting that they were being left out of policies and projects (Klein et al., 2007). In the case of climate change, mainstreaming implies the integration of climate change concerns into existing or planned policies and institutions at national level, including also the mainstreaming of activities to reduce climate change impacts, exposure and sensitivity into policies and projects of multilateral organisations, donor agencies and other relevant bodies. Cross-referencing knowledge of climate change with plans such as the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs, country-based strategies for poverty reduction) can provide a useful starting point to identify national level risks from climate change. These steps are vital in order to avoid planning and implementing strategies that are not in line with current and future development needs, which could result in maladaptation, whereby people inadvertently become more vulnerable to climate change as a consequence of interventions.

Social protection programmes, described as offering ‘predictable funding for predictable needs’ (Ellis et al., 2009), are aimed at securing basic needs for vulnerable social groups and are rapidly expanding across Africa. Ellis et al. (2009) identify four categories of social transfer; cash, food, inputs and assets. Although reversal of asset depletion due to shocks is an implicit objective, most social protection programmes do not include an explicit disaster response component. We consider one such case for Ethiopia, where a significant social protection programme has emerged partly on the basis of experiences from a series of drought-related disaster responses during the late 1990s and early 2000s (WFP, 2005). The core of the activity is the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) which aims to move people and institutional approaches away from emergency response into more sustainable livelihood programmes with a focus on asset building, especially productive community assets, and asset protection during shocks. In 2005, the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) initiated the PSNP as the chief instrument to address food insecurity. Consequently, in 2007, 8.3 million people in ‘chronically’ food insecure households in rural Ethiopia received resources from the PSNP through cash transfers or food payments in exchange for participation in labour-intensive public works projects. The background and rationale to the programme, and early experiences are described by the World Bank (2008), Wiseman (2007) and Devereux et al. (2006). We are particularly keen to understand whether such social protection programmes can play a role in adaptation to climate change, in the context of other challenges such as implementation, targeting and dependency.

While the PSNP aims to offer a vehicle for delivering timely livelihood protection to the chronically food insecure, the transiently food insecure remain subject to the vagaries of the emergency relief system. In 2007 the World Food Programme (WFP), World Bank and the GoE began developing a broader drought risk management framework for the programme and a drought risk financing component (World Bank, 2008). This approach proposes to facilitate predictable disbursement of resources for less predictable problems, in effect allowing the immediate scale-up of PSNP activities in response to drought events.

This paper aims to assess climate change risks in Ethiopia and identify entry points for their incorporation in development practice and policy. We consider risks and adaptation responses primarily at the national level and use insights from Ethiopia to identify wider lessons for sub-Saharan Africa. The analysis is based on the premise that to understand the significance of future climate change and identify practical adaptation measures requires a better understanding of how society interacts with climate in the present, coupled with information about the nature of future climate risks, which can be set within the context of rapidly evolving livelihood systems and priorities for human development. We focus primarily on the present and near future to inform decision making and policy processes in relation to development planning (e.g. 2–5 years for PRSP planning horizons, 2015 for the Millennium Development Goals and 2–3 decades for infrastructure). Our overarching aim can be sub-divided into four interrelated questions. First, with what level of confidence and detail can we describe emergent and future climate hazards associated with anthropogenic climate change? Second, how strong is the evidence base on climate–society interactions to support assessments of the significance of future climate change? Third, what are the main institutional considerations related to addressing climate risks? Fourth, what types of actions are relevant for low-regrets adaptation actions in the short-term future? We use our answers to these questions to highlight challenges and opportunities for mainstreaming climate risks.

Our study integrates multiple data types and results from a range of methods to generate an integrated study of climate risks and potential adaptations: literature review; analysis of observed climate statistics, climate model output and agricultural and economic statistics to assess the potential significance of future climate change; in-country consultation with government and non-government experts to identify key risks and the context of institutional response. We explore in detail one promising opportunity for low-regrets response through a case study of an ongoing programme to incorporate drought risk financing mechanisms within Ethiopia's social protection programme. This uses a climate impact assessment of crop yields and drought insurance pay-outs based on a modelling software platform combined with a qualitative climate-risk screening exercise.