Climate change — adapting is crucial too

Climate change is a reality in developing regions, who say the international community must not neglect better adaptation strategies

"My mother-in-law taught me how to cook over flood waters — my mother couldn’t teach me as she lives in a drought area," smiles 40-year-old Shanti Lata Mazumdar, resident of the increasingly flood-prone Gopalgram village, 150 kilometres south of Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka.

Cooking on a stove perched on a bed amid flood waters is just one of the problems for people in Gopalgram. Water contamination and diarrhoea outbreaks in humans and cattle are widespread, and crops and fish are washed away — while water rats nibble away at what’s left.

Gopalgram lies on a low-lying plain that is frequently flooded by the swelling Ganges and Jamuna rivers, and is one of many poor areas that will be on the receiving end of the potentially disastrous effects of global warming. Those affected will need to adapt to climate change, with many oblivious to the causes and most of the perpetrators in industrialised countries thousands of miles away.

Now, the latest research indicates that adaptation could be more pressing than previously thought. For many, pockets of local knowledge may not be enough for coping with increased storms and floods; more drought and heat; and less predictable weather patterns.

Techniques from across a region and further afield, new technologies and more resources and funding will all be needed by those most affected in least developed countries (LDCs). The challenge is to move adaptation strategies up the political agenda — and fast.

The group’s update on scientific findings about climate change, summarised in a report released at a UN meeting in Bonn in June 2009, warns that the effects of climate change will be much worse and quicker than previously believed.  

If society does not use existing technological, behavioural and managerial tools to deal with climate change, adaptation will be difficult, warns Katherine Richardson, vice-dean of the faculty of science at the University of Copenhagen and chair of the university alliance.

Copenhagen will host a major international climate meeting in December that will address — among other issues — how to provide LDCs with the money and the technology needed for adaptation.

Adaptation has to work on two fronts at the same time, as Terry Cannon, reader in development studies at the University of Greenwich, London, pointed out at an international conference on community adaptation held in Dhaka in February 2009. Communities need to adapt to everyday changes in patterns of rainfall, temperature, and crop and livestock diseases — and also deal with disasters when they occur.

Millions of poor communities across Asia and Africa have a storehouse of traditional knowledge to fall back on during hard times. In Gopalgram and similar water-logged areas, farmers create floating gardens, using abundant water hyacinths as an organic base on which to cultivate fast-growing vegetables, spices and medicinal herbs.

They have raised the floors of their huts and the beds of vegetable plots and tube wells to avoid submergence, set up nurseries to plant flood-tolerant trees, and built traps for water rats, experts reported at the Dhaka conference.

In Sunderbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest, shared by Bangladesh and India, farmers are changing to a multiple cropping system, supplementing rice crops with rearing ducks and fish in inundated ponds, and growing vegetables on floating gardens.

In Nepal, a Himalayan country threatened by glacier melt, farmers have developed hanging nurseries and seed storage banks on higher ground, and sow seeds on soil heaps to avoid flood waters washing them away. They have diversified to stress-tolerant wild brinjals and winter beans; and intercrop rice with maize, tomatoes and chillies. Others are working on flood warning mechanisms, and building embankments along rivers and shallow tube wells to collect water.

"Building on local knowledge and farming innovations is the way to promote community-based adaptation," says Bimal Raj Regmi, senior programme officer at Local Initiatives for Biodiversity Research and Development, a Kathmandu-based NGO. "Low-cost technologies and approaches will be meaningful for poor households."

Meanwhile, farmers in south-eastern Benin — who fish along the Oueme river and grow corn, cassava, cowpeas and leafy vegetables for a living — are worried about the increasingly unpredictable and disappearing rainfall in their area.

"People’s adaptation to environmental change [along the Oueme] combines technical fixes such as faster-maturing crops and seed banks with institutional support such as social networks," says Krystel Dossou, an agricultural economist at Organisation of Women’s Management of Energy, Environment and Integrated Development in Benin.