RealClimate had an interesting post the other day about adaptation – specifically, how we bring together models that operate at the global-to-regional scales with an understanding of current and future impacts of climate change, which we feel at the local scale. This post was written from a climate science perspective – and so focuses on modeling capabilities and needs as related to the biophysical world. In doing so, I think that one key uncertainty in our use of downscaled models for adaptation planning is huge – the likely pathways of human response to changes in the climate over the next several decades. In places like sub-Saharan Africa, how people respond to climate change will have impacts on land use decisions, and therefore land cover . . . and land cover is a key component of local climate. In other words, as we downscale climate models, we need to start adding new types of data to them – social data on adaptation decision-making, so that we might project plausible future pathways and build them into these downscaled models.
For example, many modeling exercises currently suggest that a combination of temperature increases and changes in the amount and pattern of rainfall in parts of southern Africa will make it very difficult to raise maize there over the next few decades. This is a major problem, as maize is a staple of the region. So, what will people do? Will they continue to grow maize that is less hardy and takes up less CO2 and water as it grows, will they switch to a crop that takes up more CO2 than maize ever did, or will they begin to abandon the land and migrate to cities, creating pockets of fallow land and/or opening a frontier for mechanized agriculture (both outcomes likely to have significant impacts on greenhouse gas emissions and water cycling, among other things)? Simply put, we don’t really know. But we need to know, and we need to know with reasonably high resolution. That is, it is not enough to simply say “they will stop planting maize and plant X.” We need to know when this transition will take place. We need to know if it will happen suddenly or gradually. We need to know if that transition will itself be sustainable going forward, or if other changes will be needed in the near future. All of this information needs to be part of iterative model runs that capture land cover changes and biogeochemical cycling changes associated with these decisions to better understand future local pathways of climate change impacts and the associated likely adaptation pathways that these populations will occupy.
The good news* is that I am on this – along with my colleague Brent McCusker at West Virginia University (see pubs here and here). Between the two of us, we’ve developed a pretty solid understanding of adaptation and livelihoods decision-making, and have spent a good bit of time theorizing the link between land use change and livelihoods change to enable the examination of the issues I have raised above. We have a bit of money from NSF to run a pilot this summer (Brent will manage this while I am a government employee), and I plan to spend next year working on how to integrate this research program into the global climate change programming of my current employer.
Long and short: climate modelers, you need us social scientists, now more than ever. We’re here to work with you . . .
*Calling this good news presumes that you see me as competent, or at least that you see Brent as competent enough to make up for my incompetence.
Tag: livelihoods
Adaptation, Development and Occam's Razor
Adrian Fenton, writing on the website of IIED (whose work I generally like), seems to be pushing the idea that community-based adaptation (that is, adaptation that builds upon/strengthens strategies employed at the local scale) and microfinance go hand-in-hand. I am not so sure this is a good idea – I feel like IIED has missed a fundamental point here – for most of the developing world, livelihoods are about avoiding and managing risks and challenges – and then capitalizing on any surplus that might come about after managing those risks. As many have noted, this largely risk-averse approach to making a living hugely constrains opportunity because you cannot employ all of your resources in an effort to engage in markets/work off the farm/what have you – you have to effectively waste a bunch of them guarding against events that often don’t happen. One way in which this happens, which I lay out in my book and have discussed on this blog, is when people set up their livelihoods in a manner that allows them to temporarily deglobalize when markets turn against them. This effectively requires holding back resources from market sale in case you have to rely on them directly. For example, farmers who keep the deglobalization option open in their livelihoods hold back a portion of their labor from market engagement as they dedicate time to planting and raising food crops that might be used for subsistence purposes if the markets turn.
Given this fundamental characteristic of so many livelihoods that we see in the Global South, it seems to me that coupling adaptation (current community- and household-level livelihoods are, in effect, adaptation efforts that go on continuously) with microfinance applies the wrong medicine to the problem – people don’t need more capital, they need a way to free up the various resources they already have from the necessary conservativism of their current livelihoods strategies. Adding loans, even small loans, to the current livelihoods mix simply increases risk without necessarily providing benefits that offset that risk.
Instead, it seems to me we ought to be shifting our focus toward microinsurance and away from microfinance – microinsurance provides the safety net that enables risk-taking at the household and community level, and therefore empowers people to use their existing resources in the manner they best see fit. In short, it allows us to meet some of the financial requirements for adaptation without having to create new financial vehicles, and new forms of risk in already-stressed livelihoods. This is a much more direct means of addressing the challenges to local livelihoods posed by climate change impacts and raising the capital needed to address future risks, rather than offering seed capital, hoping the business/effort works out with enough profit to pay back the loan and provide a large surplus that might then be employed to address climate change.
This strikes me as the adaptation and development version of Occam’s razor – when evaluating plans for future adaptation efforts, select the one that requires the fewest new institutions and steps to raise the capital/resources necessary to meet future challenges.
Equality in the oddest places – or why purchasing power parity matters
My family and I are in the midst of a relocation to Washington, DC, a city with a cost of living at least 35% higher than my current home here in Columbia, SC. The rent for our (nice but hardly lavish) new place approaches double that of my current mortgage, and childcare is going to run us 50% above what we are used to here. And I am moving to take up a fellowship that grants me a 13% increase over my current salary to make up these costs . . . yes, I am going backward to take up this position, but I think this opportunity is too important to pass up. Luckily, my wife agrees.
The net outcome of this is a situation where my family will be living hand-to-mouth for a year or two, despite having two pretty good salaries under one roof. This situation reminds me of a story I use to explain the importance of purchasing power parity when comparing incomes and/or material standards of living in different places. Purchasing power parity is a measure of what your money will buy you, based on a “market basket” of goods that you might buy in each place. Since things like food are much more expensive here in the United States than they are in farming communities in sub-Saharan Africa, it makes no sense to compare incomes between these two places without normalizing for what those incomes can purchase. Which leads to my story . . .
My first year doing fieldwork in Ghana, I spent a lot of time simply hanging around, talking to people, getting my bearings and building relationships. Once the folks in Dominase and Ponkrum realized that I was 1) actually listening to them when they spoke and 2) willing to answer any questions they might have of me, I never lacked for evening conversation. This was especially true when I was buying the akpeteshi (distilled palm wine – it’s pretty serious stuff).
One night, while I was talking about money, incomes and making a living with a group of people in Dominase, the issue of my income and net worth came up. Now, at the time I was a graduate student in Anthropology, just about to start a Ph.D. program in Geography. I was fortunate enough to have a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which is (by grad school standards) a very generous award . . . but it was still not much to live on. In the interest of honesty, I told them exactly what my annual stipend amounted to: $14,000*. Once someone managed to convert that into Cedis (the local currency, then trading at about 2300 to the dollar), this news resulted in shouting and amazement.
I then asked if I could explain what things cost me in America. I began to lay things out – my rent of $350/month (this provoked a near-riot, as $350 is as much as some households earn in a year in these villages). Then the cost of food – and another near riot, as the farmers began to realize that crops like the oranges they sold me for the equivalent of 5 cents were worth at least twenty times that amount in the US. I then explained about my car, gasoline, insurance, clothing, etc. Never let anyone suggest that a lack of education leads to deficiencies in mathematics – despite incomplete elementary educations, nearly every person in these villages engages in trade in markets in nearby towns. As a result, they can add and subtract large and complex sums in their heads very, very rapidly. Several of the villagers talking to me were converting the amounts I was listing into Cedis, and then adding this total up as we went along. As I came to the end, one of them looked at me and said (in Fante, via my field assistant’s interpretation) “then you have nothing!” “Yes!” I replied (in English – I did not yet speak Fante – but yes is pretty well understood in Anglophone Africa). There was a pause, and then a general cheer of “nothing!” broke out among the assembled group – and with that, most residents of the village stopped seeing me as particularly rich, and therefore much more able to understand what it meant to live from hand to mouth as they did**. At the end of each month, we all had nothing!
Here I am, some 13 years later – with tenure, and paid reasonably well. And moving into a situation where, once again, at the end of each month I will have nothing! I’m not sure if the folks in Dominase and Ponkrum will be horrified or amused. But they will understand . . .
* I should note that I was completely screwed by NSF with regard to the size of my stipend – there was no cost of living adjustment across the four years I held the fellowship. As soon as it ran out for me, though, they instituted a 50% (!!!) increase – the next year. Yes, I am still a little bitter about that.
** This is not to say that I did, in the end, completely understand what it meant to be a resident of these villages. While I tried as hard as I could to live under the same strictures as the villagers when I was in the villages, I also spent time in more comfortable settings in Cape Coast. Further, when things went wrong (such as in 1998, when the monsoon failed and a lot of the farms around these villages failed), I experienced short-term discomfort and frustration, but always knew that I had resources to meet my needs, if only I chose to walk a few miles to the nearest road and catch a cab. Thus, while I spent a few days without food in 1998, like everyone else in these villages, I always knew that if things got really bad, I could get to a road and to a store where I could buy food with money from my bank account in the US. Thus, I cannot say that I understand what it is like to live on the edge like the people I work with do each and every day – honestly, none of us really can.