Dairy development provides substantial potential economic opportunities for smallholder farmers in East Africa, but productivity is constrained by the scarcity of quantity and quality feed. Ruminant livestock production is also associated with negative environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, air pollution, high water consumption, land-use change, and loss of biodiversity.

Forage-based cattle systems play a key role in rural economies of developing countries in terms of food security and poverty alleviation. However, they can generate negative environmental impacts by contributing to increased greenhouse gas emissions, land degradation, and reduction of biodiversity.

This factsheet gives answers on how climate exacerbates root causes of livestock-related conflict in
Kenya, using an impact pathway analysis. Three main impact pathways are identified:

The climate-smart agriculture (CSA) concept reflects an ambition to improve the integration of agriculture development and climate responsiveness. CSA aims to achieve food security and broader development goals under a changing climate and increasing food demand. CSA initiatives can sustainably increase productivity, enhance resilience, and reduce/remove greenhouse gases (GHGs), but require planning to address trade-offs and synergies between the three CSA pillars, namely: productivity, adaptation, and mitigation(1).

Land degradation is rampant in Africa, accounting for 46% of the total land area. Land degradation at the current pace is projected to render more than half of the cultivated land in Africa unusable by 2050. Land degradation and climate change mutually reinforce each other, creating serious implications for food security, biodiversity and livelihoods in Africa. Effective early warning systems are an essential and important alert mechanism for addressing land degradation.

The productivity of small ruminants in developing countries remains low although the animals play an integral role in the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. Current information on their productive performance and contribution to the household incomes of smallholder farmers in Eastern Africa is limited. This study was implemented as part of an on-going small ruminant improvement project by the Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Kericho and Kisumu Counties of the Lake Victoria basin of Kenya.

This factsheet gives answers on how climate exacerbates root causes of conflict in Mali, using an impact pathway analysis. Two main impact pathways are identified:

Poster presented at the 5th World Congress on Agroforestry: “Transitioning to a Viable World”. Québec, Canada, July 17-20, 2022: For agricultural production, exploiting mountain slopes for rainwater runoff collection is a low-cost practice that supports sustainable agroecological systems and increases yield. To this day, people in rural communities continue to use an ancient and well-known system called Jessour to strengthen agricultural productive capacity and diversify their livelihoods.

This report was inspired by the 2019 Kigali African Food Security Leadership Dialogue (AFSLD) that called for joint action to tackle the African Food Security challenges. ECOWAS, CILSS, CORAF, Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), and the World Bank provided overall leadership for the process and analysis that underpins this report. Wageningen University prepared a background paper as input to the report.

This brief summarizes findings of a project entitled “Food Security in Developing Countries: Gender and Spatial Interactions’” undertaken by researchers from the University of Alberta. The project uses a large cross-sectional dataset from the Integrated Modelling Platform for Mixed Animal Crop systems (IMPACT) Lite collected by Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS) from 2010 to late 2012. This dataset surveyed 1,500 households located across seven countries in Africa and Asia.

‘‘End hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition and promote agriculture” is one of the stated goals of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. A major obstacle to achieving this goal is the growing incidence of armed conflict, terrorism and state fragility in the developing world. This obstacle deserves to be understood in particular its relation with food insecurity. In this perspective, availability of data in conflict regions has allowed the economic literature to provide a better understanding of the relationship between conflict and food security.

The vulnerability assessment for the selected crops in Senegal is based on the interaction of sensitivity to change, exposure, and adaptive capacity. We use the conceptual framework of climate-related risk from the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II (WGII) to examine the impacts that climate change is likely to have on agriculture and food security.