A study of Climate change adaptation practices and their implementations.
1) Introduction-
A series of reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the Nineties conclusively linked increasing climate variability as a consequence of human actions resulting in increasing quantities of Green House Gases in the environment.
These reports led to a call for international action and thus the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was established in 1994. The Framework envisaged two main strategies to tackle climate change-
• Mitigation- processes involving reducing the output of green house gases
• Adaptation-methods used to cope with climate change
1.1) The need for Adaptation-
Mitigation practices were initially the method of choice but it gradually became apparent that the rapidity of climate change called for a policy mix of both strategies.
Adaptation practices and their documentations saw a steady increase as the effect of decades old emissions caught up after a time lag. Which is why November 2006 the UNFCCC published a technical paper titled “Application of environmentally sound technologies for adaptation to climate change (FCC/TP/2006/2)” which summarized practices, methods and adaptations techniques carried out in various climatic regions.
In a separate UNFCCC publication titled “Climate Change: Impacts, vulnerabilities and adaptation in Developing Countries”, the following table was published as guide to adaptation in relevant environments-
Table 1: Adaptation as seen in vulnerable sectors (UNFCCC, July 25, 2006)
2) Area specific adaptation techniques:
Adaptation techniques are not ‘one-off’ occurrences, they need to be repeated periodically for maximum effe...
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Climate change is on the international policy agenda primarily because of warnings from scientists. Their forecasts of a potentially dangerous increase in the average global temperature, fortuitously assisted by unusual weather events, have prompted governments to enter into perhaps the most complicated and most significant set of negotiations ever attempted. Key questions - the rapidity of global climate change, its effects on the natural systems on which humans depend, and the options available to lessen or adapt to such change - have energized the scientific and related communities in analyses that are deeply dependent on scientific evidence and research.
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Climate change was a topic developed by a Swedish scientist as far back as 1896 due to the combustion of fossil fuel. The first predicted global warming was in 1976. In 1988, the theory was finally acknowledged when the climate became the hottest within the century (Maslin, 2008). The greenhouse effect became a concern and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was founded. Damages from greenhouse gases could include severe climate changes, altered ecosystem, extinction and loss of biodiversity (Shogren, 2004). The Kyoto Protocol was introduced to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The main six chemicals that needed to be reduced were CO2, CH4, N2O, HFCs, PFCs, and SF6 (Parker & Blodgett, 2010). The goal
In order to get a comprehensive picture of these issues, this chapter reviews literature on climate change and vulnerability. It begins by defining climate change and analyzing global climate change in general and its impacts on local smallholder farmer’s livelihoods in a developing country such as Zimbabwe. Lastly the chapter also assesses the measures of adaptation which smallholder farmers can use to increase their coping capacity and resilience to climate change and variability.
Funding international adaptation to help the world 's most vulnerable peoples adjust to the effects of global warming from which they are already suffering. Adaptation actions will reduce or avoid tensions around such issues as water sources and food shortages, thus alleviating global security problems (The Union of Concerned Scientists, 11).
Adapting agriculture to climate change is essential to increase resilience of farmers and other players in the food system. Adapting food systems to climate change will take long-term visioning, targeted research, development of new technologies and human capacity development. Resilience in the farmers’ level will involve implementation of sustainable farming practices, diversification and an increased emphasis on management of the entire agro-ecological
In order to assess climate change from a security standpoint it is necessary to consider its potential future implications as well as their magnitude for different states and groups. It is clear that everybody will bear the effects of climate change, although the effects will be uneven and disproportionately distributed. States with less adaptive capacity, which can be determined by levels of “human health and food security, self-reliance, governmental capacity and poverty/development” , intensifies their vulnerability to the effects of climate change. The manifestations of climate change in the future ma...
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Our world is always changing, so is our climate. Some changes are apparent, others not so much. Climate change is an important issue of concern in the twenty-first century. Environment, if it changes at all, evolves so slowly that the difference cannot be seen in a human lifetime (Wearth, 2014). Mostly all scientists predicted that it would take thousands of years for the planet to warm up due to emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels called greenhouse gases. But in the past 200 years, things began to change. The rate and the amount of warming that is happening on this planet are unprecedented. Wearth says, “People did not grasp the prodigious fact that both population and industrialization were exploding in a pattern of exponential
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...local agriculture and food security, this paper attempts to give an overview of observed and projected climate change in Sri Lanka, its impact on the agriculture sector and climate change adaptation strategies through reviewing recent literature on climate change. To develop appropriate strategies and institutional responses to climate change targeting smallholder farmers it is necessary to have a good understanding about the local farming environment in terms of farmer perception about climate change, key issues faced by farmers in overcoming climate adversities, local knowledge and strengths on climate change adaptation. There is a dearth of such research studies undertaken in Sri Lanka therefore; this paper presents a case study undertaken on a farming community in the intermediate zone to demonstrate how farmers perceive and respond to climate adversities.