Climate risk management and rural poverty reduction
By James Hansen, J. Hellin, T. Rosenstock, E. Fisher, Jill E. Cairns, C. Stirling, C. Lamanna, J. van Etten, A. Rose, B. Campbell. Agricultural Systems, 2018
289 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Climate variability is a major source of risk to smallholder farmers and pastoralists, particularly in dryland regions. A growing body of evidence links climate-related risk to the extent and the persistence of rural poverty in these environments. Stochastic shocks erode smallholder farmers' long-term livelihood potential through loss of productive assets. The resulting uncertainty impedes progress out of poverty by acting as a disincentive to investment in agriculture – by farmers, rural financial services, value chain institutions and governments. We assess evidence published in the last ten years that a set of production technologies and institutional options for managing risk can stabilize production and incomes, protect assets in the face of shocks, enhance uptake of improved technologies and practices, improve farmer welfare, and contribute to poverty reduction in risk-prone smallholder agricultural systems. Production technologies and practices such as stress-adapted crop germplasm, conservation agriculture, and diversified production systems stabilize agricultural production and incomes and, hence, reduce the adverse impacts of climate-related risk under some circumstances. Institutional interventions such as index-based insurance and social protection through adaptive safety nets play a complementary role in enabling farmers to manage risk, overcome risk-related barriers to adoption of improved technologies and practices, and protect their assets against the impacts of extreme climatic events. While some research documents improvements in household welfare indicators, there is limited evidence that the risk-reduction benefits of the interventions reviewed have enabled significant numbers of very poor farmers to escape poverty. We discuss the roles that climate-risk management interventions can play in efforts to reduce rural poverty, and the need for further research on identifying and targeting environments and farming populations where improved climate risk management could accelerate efforts to reduce rural poverty.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/93df75ee30a5b6a0ac484634585016481cc2d47a
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Soil Science
Citations in the corpus
- A review of types of risks in agriculture: What we know and what we need to know (2020, unknown): “Other researchers have also argued that the risks associated with climate change, economic volatility, globalization, and political instability have become more pronounced and severe (Barrett and Constas, 2014; Darnhofer et al., 2016; Hansen et al., 2019).”
- The Dynamics of Climate Change Adaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Review of Climate-Smart Agriculture among Small-Scale Farmers (2019, background): “The challenges the farmers are facing with climate change have necessitated the adoption of concepts or innovations that can offer them the opportunity to improve soil productivity and mitigate climate-related risks [22].”
- Food and Earth Systems: Priorities for Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation for Agriculture and Food Systems (2019, background): “In cases where agricultural production may not offer a realistic near-term pathway out of poverty, PSSN may allow poor smallholder and family farmers to build up sufficient assets to move out of poverty through improvements to their farming, or provide a level of security until growth in other secto”