Evaluating Successful Livelihood Adaptation to Climate Variability and Change in Southern Africa

By H. Osbahr, Chasca Twyman, W. Adger, David S. G. Thomas. 2010

224 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper examines the success of small-scale farming livelihoods in adapting to climate variability and change. We represent adaptation actions as choices within a response space that includes coping but also longer-term adaptation actions, and define success as those actions which promote system resilience, promote legitimate institutional change, and hence generate and sustain collective action. We explore data on social responses from four regions across South Africa and Mozambique facing a variety of climate risks. The analysis suggests that some collective adaptation actions enhance livelihood resilience to climate change and variability but others have negative spillover effects to other scales. Any assessment of successful adaptation is, however, constrained by the scale of analysis in terms of the temporal and spatial boundaries on the system being investigated. In addition, the diversity of mechanisms by which rural communities in southern Africa adapt to risks suggests that external interventions to assist adaptation will need to be sensitive to the location-specific nature of adaptation.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b6f6067b0b6b5f02c0a94cff30b19fef5aa10b3d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. A. Dougill
2. P. Antwi‐Agyei
3. B. Smit
4. Liette Connolly-Boutin
5. Evan D. G. Fraser
6. Lindsay C. Stringer

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

1. A. Dougill
2. Evan D. G. Fraser
3. P. Antwi‐Agyei
4. B. Smit
5. Liette Connolly-Boutin
6. Lindsay C. Stringer

In Soil Science

1. A. Dougill
2. P. Antwi‐Agyei
3. B. Smit
4. Liette Connolly-Boutin
5. Evan D. G. Fraser
6. Lindsay C. Stringer

Citations in the corpus

• Characterising the nature of household vulnerability to climate variability: empirical evidence from two regions of Ghana (2013, background): “Several writers have documented the role of social capital in coping with the impacts associated with environmental (including climate) change in communities (Adger 2003; Pretty 2003; Osbahr et al. 2010).”
• Climate change, food security, and livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa (2016, background): “Sustainable livelihood approaches have been used to address a range of issues regarding development in subSaharan Africa, including: • the effects of power and gender relations on the lives of specific groups of people (e.g., women) (Canagarajah et al. 2001; Mandel 2004; Oberhauser and Pratt 2004), ”