Overview

				Flock of sheep in a pen belonging to the Bedouin community

Tawfiq El-Zabri, Jessica Lattughi and Elisabetta Vaccari reported on the issue of  Water and Climate change. Water scarcity is the major vulnerability in the world's driest region, the Near East and North Africa (NENA), where per capita water availability is predicted to halve by 2050 even without the effects of climate change. Scientists predict that dry areas in NENA will become drier and droughts will become more frequent; rainfall patterns will become more volatile and unreliable; sea levels will rise and soil salinity will increase in coastal areas and the Nile delta; and the occurrence of extreme events, such as frosts and flash floods, will increase.  

The increased water scarcity combined with greater climate variability will threaten agriculture, which accounts for some 85 per cent of the region's water use. Irrigated and rainfed crop production will face increased competition for water from municipalities, industry and tourism.

Soil moisture depletion will likely reduce agriculture and forestry productivity and possibly lead to the extinction of sensitive species. Valuable ecosystems could be lost as species fail to keep up with the shift in climate boundaries. Pastoral and agropastoral livelihoods that rely on rangelands and livestock production are likely to be most vulnerable since they are often located in marginal areas and spread over a wide area. Desert oases may face the threat of evaporation, salinization and desertification.

The distribution of pests and diseases and their transmission patterns are also likely to be influenced and there will be an increased probability of epidemic outbreaks. Vulnerability is compounded by social and political tensions that will be exacerbated by climate change, particularly by conflicts and competition over water.

ICARDA’s role 

With a mandate from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) to improve crops in stressful environments of the dry areas, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) prioritizes research that addresses agriculture in the context of heat and water stress. Consequently, ICARDA has developed expertise and knowledge that can help IFAD support coping strategies that help small-scale farmers manage with less water and amidst other climatic trends. While its focus is on adapting to increased water scarcity and extreme events, there are instances where ICARDA's activities spill over into mitigation. According to its Strategic Plan for 2007–2016, a number of components and planned outputs will contribute directly to meeting the challenges of climate change (see Annex 1). Many of these outputs provide benefits for adaptation and mitigation and at least some of them have scope for wider replication by IFAD projects:  

• On-farm biodiversity management has the potential to increase resilience to extreme events (for example floods, droughts, strong rainfall and outbreaks of pests and diseases). In addition, fertilization reduces NO2 emissions. To support biodiversity, IFAD projects can
  • promote the use of indigenous and locally adapted crop varieties and livestock species with higher resilience
  • disseminate extension messages that improve crop rotations, intercropping and strip cropping.
• Biodiversity activities that increase ecosystem richness and improve nutrient and water efficiency (by creating a more favourable microclimate) have the added benefits of supporting resilience, contributing to carbon sequestration and reduced CO2 emissions from avoided deforestation and contributing to reduced NO2 emissions from fertilization. These biodiversity activities include
  • agroforestry activities and
  • farm landscaping systems (for example using hedges, vegetative buffers, strips and trees).  
• Improved soil management techniques limit erosion and improve water and nutrient efficiency, thereby contributing to adaptation; they also support reduced NO2 emissions and carbon sequestration. These improved soil management techniques include:
  • Low or zero tillage
  • Conservation agriculture or organic agriculture with no-tillage and permanent soil cover
  • Mulching, which limits evaporation and erosion and improves nutrient efficiency
• Improved feed resources (for example feed blocks)also reduce emissions, primarily by increasing nutrient efficiency.
• Pasture rotations, reseeding and sylvo-pastoralismstrengthen resilience by increasing ecosystem richness and support adaptation by improving water and nutrient efficiency and limiting soil compaction and erosion.
• Water managementimproves resilience to drought and increases productivity.

Other research areas under development

ICARDA’s work on climate change includes research and analytic work in the areas described below:

Water policies, programming and technical solutions. The Center's Integrated Water and Land Management Programme (IWLMP) is at the forefront of ICARDA's work on climate change; seed scientists and the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Unit also contribute in this area. The IWLMP presentation highlighted that real water loss comes from evaporation and plant transpiration; seepage and run-off are considered recoverable, even if at a cost. There is a need, therefore, to focus on water productivity instead of only on irrigation efficiency. Irrigation efficiency is a largely engineering point of view that focuses on irrigation performance, ignores recoverable losses and does not consider returns (including biomass, incomes, nutrition, energy, environmental benefits and social benefits such as employment) per unit of water depleted (through evaporation, transpiration and quality deterioration).

How is this relevant to climate change?  To help farmers in NENA adapt to climatic trends (particularly to the reduction and volatility of water availability and higher heat stress), it is necessary to emphasize the water constraint – rather then the land constraint – at the basin, country, farmer and field levels.

Although the rural poor have limited landholdings, water, not land, is their main resource constraint to productivity, and there is great potential to increase water productivity in the region. Consequently, technical solutions and extension messages must focus on optimizing the productivity of water rather than land. Adaptation options must also recognize the challenges of rainfed farming which include loss of organic matter, nutrient depletion and soil erosion. Socio-economic constraints include small holdings, markets and policies and the limited ability to invest.  In countries where there is no charge for using groundwater, the role of policies and development planning becomes more pronounced in ensuring higher water productivity.  

ICARDA presented a number of technical solutions to the above constraints, focussing on opportunities related to supplementary/deficit irrigation and water harvesting.

Green accounting. A brief exchange with ICARDA staff highlighted the importance of green accounting in efforts to improve natural resource management, particularly in the context of climate change. Green accounting incorporates environmental assets and their source and sink functions into national (and corporate) accounts. Conventional national accounts largely ignore:

• New or newly observed scarcities of natural resources that threaten to undermine the sustainability of economic performance and growth.

• Environmental degradation as an “external” (for example social) cost of economic activity.

In 1993, the United Nations issued The Handbook of National Accounting: Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting and revised it in 2003. In addition, the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP’s) Green Accounting Virtual Centre.

Information technology/GIS. Modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are helping to accelerate the efficiency and precision of research, particularly on issues related to climate change. New mapping techniques using remotely-sensed data and GIS have helped to assess vulnerability to climate change, devise more efficient water capturing methods, locate areas with water-harvesting potential and develop suitability maps for newly developed crop varieties. Integrating climate change into development programming would benefit from climate modelling under different scenarios, but this requires regularly updated data, dynamic GIS computing capabilities and linkage with required national data sources (and global and regional models from other regions) that appear to require further development. For an overview of some regional climatic modelling in the Mediterranean region

Payments for environmental services.  ICARDA's Strategic Plan includes feasibility studies for payments for environmental services (PES). Such services may provide an opportunity for adapting to and mitigating climate change.  In addition to increased agricultural productivity and food security, ecosystem services can include biodiversity enhancement, landscape improvement, carbon sequestration, biofuels production and land and water protection, among others. IFAD has worked with the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) to develop methods for effective pro-poor PES in Asia and Africa. Among the innovations has been using participatory approaches to monitor and measure environmental services, which has reduced measurement costs (one of the key challenges for PES mechanisms) by an estimated 90 per cent. Introducing these methods into NENA may benefit from synergies with ICARDA's technical solutions, remote-sensing and GIS modelling in the region.

For an overview of the challenges and potential for PES, see the Chatham House presentation 

Conservation agriculture: mitigation through carbon sequestration?  

Agriculture and livestock are important contributors to "man-made" climate drivers because of their carbon and methane emissions. There are significant opportunities to mitigate this through modified agricultural practices or through carbon sequestration in soils. Sequestration through agriculture is not well-developed, in part because of the absence of agriculture and livestock in global carbon emissions treaties, and because of the sector's limited access to global carbon markets. The potential to demonstrate technologies for practical inclusion of agriculture in global carbon markets seems, so far, to be largely untapped. Similarly, the development of voluntary markets for ecosystem and environmental services by the rural poor has not been explored in the NENA region.

Consequently, there was little reference to carbon sequestration during the ICARDA visit, but some adaptive technologies also spill over into mitigation and could be further analysed. Most prominent among these is the low-tillage conservation agriculture tested by ICARDA and still not diffused in the region. By reducing the use of fuel and fertilizers, conservation agriculture can lower emissions; moreover, the minimal soil disturbance allows carbon to remain in the soil and increases soil productivity.    

Other interventions that control soil erosion, establish shrubs and woody perennials, enhance soil fertility and manage crop residue also aid in mitigating climate change by returning more carbon to the soil. Thus, carbon sequestration activities that improve soil carbon content have the potential to improve agricultural productivity in marginal lands of NENA. A project funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) – Sequestration of Carbon in Soil Organic Matter – is carrying out further research on this issue in Senegal. In collaboration with IFAD projects, ICARDA is also testing improved technologies for intercropping barley with salt bushes (atriplex), planting fodder crops to restore rangelands and planting cactus to reduce soil erosion and desertification. All of these are technologies that, once outscaled, will potentially improve carbon retention/sequestration in the soil and increase productivity.

For the fundamentals of carbon sequestration through soils, see the relevant publication

Recommendations

• Country programmes should consider opportunities to adopt the above-mentioned technologies, where appropriate, for enhancing resilience of targeted groups.
• Consider developing tools for integrating water productivity into economic analysis for IFAD projects.
• Consider developing guidance notes/tools for dialogue with government counterparts on green accounting, particularly on economic returns from improved water productivity when water is not financially costly.
• Consider working with ICARDA and global research programmes to intensify regional climate modelling for NENA.
• Explore opportunities for PES and voluntary markets, particularly for carbon sequestration. Consider the opportunities for promoting conservation agriculture in IFAD projects in NENA. Explore results from projects that test levels of carbon sequestration in soils and mechanisms for farmer benefits from resulting ecosystem services.

Annex 1: Adaptation to climate change and drought (from ICARDA Strategic Plan 2007-2016)

CARDA focuses on poor, smallholder farmers in dry areas – the people who are most affected by drought and desertification and most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Much of the Center's research contributes to mitigating the impact of drought and also has the potential to address the implications of climate change. These areas will remain a major focus of ICARDA’s strategy.

Some components and/or planned outputs of ICARDA’s Strategic Plan contribute directly to meeting the challenges of climate change. These include:

• Prospecting for genes to adapt to drought and heat stress.
• Developing plant germoplasm with greater tolerance to climatic variability.
• Reducing risks to pastoralists by improved rangeland management.
• Developing feasibility studies for PES.
• Fostering community-based development plans that increase local capacity to co-manage natural resources.
• Developing resilient crop-livestock production systems through better soil and water management and higher water-use efficiency.
• Managing crop rotations that sequester carbon, conserve water and maintain soil fertility.
• Improving feed resources that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
• Building scenarios and models to determine trade-offs between development and climate change (for example optimizing on-farm water allocation).
• Conducting livelihood analyses that include strategies to cope with unpredictable ecosystems and climate variability and change.
• Enabling policy and institutional options to promote the uptake of technologies that enhance the capacity of communities to adapt to climate change.