Browse by Theme: Climate Change

Anabig Ayaab is a 50 year old farmer from Tariganga, Garu-Tempane District, in the Upper East Region of Ghana. Tariganga is in the dry savannah zone of northern Ghana where vegetative cover is sparse, especially during the dry season. The village and surrounding landscape is flat and dusty at this time, with the few trees that still stand, including shea-nut used for cosmetics and dawadawa, a local medicinal tree, shedding their leaves. The landscape will become increasingly green with the June rains. These rains will only last until October when the dry season, with varying temperatures and wind conditions, will set in again and last for the remainder of the year, guaranteeing a hungry period from March or April until the next rains.

Borders, in the pastoral context of the drylands of the Horn of Africa with high levels of human and animal mobility, have little relevance and meaning to the populations living in border areas in Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Somalia and Somaliland. As international borders do not follow ethnic or eco-system lines, pastoral populations move freely across them. As a result, in the Horn of Africa’s border areas, it is essential to take these cross border movements and dynamics into consideration when implementing drought risk reduction programs as what happens on one side of the border affects the other.

Although cross border programming maybe across intra-country borders; ecosystem borders or ethnic borders, the discussion here is focused on international borders.

Human and natural systems are influenced by climate variability and hazards, though the negative impacts are most severely felt in developing countries. Increased climate variability, such as the occurrence of more frequent droughts and storms and more erratic or intense rainfall patterns, is associated with climatic change. Such climate change effects will intensify significantly in the future.

Community institutions weakening in the wake of climate change

This document contains a community story from the Adaptation Learning Programme (ALP). The story addresses loss of traditional community social capital and safety net practices and has links to gender, traditional governance and environment issues.

Empowered women lead on community-based adaptation to climate change.

Climate change poses the greatest direct threat in history to CARE’s vision of a world of hope, tolerance and social justice where poverty has been overcome and people live in dignity and security.

The injustice of climate change is that its negative impacts fall disproportionately on poor communities, who have contributed least to its causes.

CARE’s Adaptation Learning Programme (ALP), implemented in Ghana, Niger, Kenya and Mozambique with the support of DFID, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland and the Austrian Development Cooperation, acknowledges that inequitable distributions of rights, resources and power at all levels constrain many people’s abilities to take action on climate change.

ALP therefore seeks to improve and promote knowledge on how best to protect the livelihoods of the most vulnerable people through community-based adaptation (CBA) to climate change.

Nowhere on the planet are people more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change than in sub-Saharan Africa. The continent is already prone to erratic rainfall, droughts, floods and cyclones, and climate change will only exacerbate these ongoing challenges. At the same time, Africa is grappling with the burden of poverty, environmental degradation, inequitable land rights, heavy reliance on the natural resource base for livelihoods, and the HIV&AIDS epidemic - all of which limit the ability of people and institutions to adapt to climate change.

Community-level research conducted by CARE in Africa indicates that climate change is already having significant impacts on food and income security, and that these impacts are particularly serious for women and other marginalized groups.