Climate Exchange

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Helping the world’s poorest farmers

adapt to a changing climate

Warren Page, Manager, Communications, Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research

griculture has a significant role to play in managing a

changing climate. Farmers have a history of managing

and adapting to seasonal variation. In Australia, agri-

culture produces enough food to feed some 60 million people

worldwide, making the nation a net food exporter. This is

achieved on the driest inhabited continent.

Australia’s strong research and scientific base has led the way in

delivering innovations that have helped our farmers adapt to and

mitigate the extremes of climate. The majority of Australian farming

is undertaken at the broad-acre level, yet the lessons learned can be

delivered to different farming situations.

Developing countries are more likely to be affected by climate change

because they rely more on agriculture for employment and to contribute

to their economies. In many developing countries, agriculture employs

and provides livelihoods for 40-70 per cent of the population. Half the

world’s poor, some 500 million people, rely on farming.

Many of these farmers are smallholders, farming small parcels of

land in the hope of producing enough food to feed their families and

grow a small surplus. The poorest farmers – who are often located

on the more marginal land and production areas – could be expected

to bear the brunt of climate change impacts first. They are also the

first to feel the effects of seasonal climate variability.

Recent failures of monsoons in South Asia have demonstrated how

tenuous life can become for poor farmers. Seasonal forecasts have

not been able to predict the failures of the monsoons, so farmers

have planted seed expecting rain to fall. In the worst case scenarios

many of these farmers can lose half of their annual income and end

up with significant or increased debts. Where these debts can only

be repaid by selling land, farmers can end up with their only asset

and hope for future income disappearing.

The story is similar in many countries, from Indonesia to China

to Africa, where poor smallholders living on marginal lands lack the

ability to adapt to, and mitigate, climate risk.

The Australian aid programme is working to address these issues,

with engagement in agriculture led by the Australian Centre for

International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). Agricultural research

plays a central role in helping farmers, farmer communities and

policymakers develop strategies focused on both adapting to climate

change and lessening its effects. ACIAR funds projects that address

seasonal variability, the reduction of carbon emissions and the

ability of smallholders to adapt to climate change.

Seasonal forecasting

Many Australian and Asia-Pacific farmers grow their crops and raise

their livestock in a climate of uncertainty, marked in particular by large

variations in rainfall. Over the past 20 years scientists

have gained a clearer understanding of the mechanism

driving these seasonal swings. It is an ocean-atmosphere

interaction in the tropics that gives rise to the El Niño

Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a seesaw of climatic condi-

tions near the equator in the Pacific Ocean. It leads to

the El Niño effect, where every two to seven years the

Pacific air pressure patterns reverse. During this phase,

a high-pressure system predominates over Australia and

a low-pressure system occurs in the eastern Pacific. This

leads to droughts and bushfires in Australia, Indonesia

and other South-East Asian countries.

Scientists have gained much from studying the El

Niño phenomenon from both actual and historical

perspectives, and they now have models on which

to base predictions of changing weather and rainfall

patterns associated with ENSO.

With global warming, the concern is that El Niño

events could become more frequent and more intense.

Thus the study of these seasonal fluctuations is impor-

tant in the overall context of learning more about climate

trends and developing practical tools for farmers.

A project in the late 1990s involving Australia,

Indonesia, Zimbabwe and India adapted the RAINMAN

software package (designed to help Australian farmers

construct their individual seasonal forecasts) to

produce an international version. This made the tools

for seasonal forecasting available to help agriculture in

developing countries. The challenge was to convince

farmers of their worth.

ACIAR-funded work extended the use of seasonal

forecasts to the Philippines, partnering with the

Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical

Services Administration (PAGASA) to develop and

implement strategies to better match forecasts with

decision makers’ needs. The project involved a series

of farm-level and policy-level case studies to deter-

mine how the farmers integrate forecasts into their risk

management strategies. The team found International

RAINMAN a valuable tool to convey the times of the

year and locations to expect a strong ENSO signal, and

when to use climatology as the most appropriate guide

to the approaching season.

PAGASA benefited from the collaboration, lifting its

capacity to deliver seasonal climate forecasts (SCFs) for

the regions in the case studies. PAGASA in turn part-

griculture