Youth Marker 1

This Decision Tool aims to help field level extension staff make climate smart decisions on which planting system option best suits their farmers’ context. This tool is not designed as a technical guide to implementation. It is designed to assist extension staff in making climate-smart decisions on improvements to their farming systems with their clients/farmers. Reference to technical guides relevant to the practices/technologies outlined are included at the end of the tool. The tool focuses on some oftheBestBetClimateSmartPlantingSystemOptions forMaizeandSorghumproductionintheSouthernAfrican development community(SADC)region.
 

This Decision Tool aims to help field level extension staff make climate smart decisions on which soil amendment optionbestsuitstheirfarmers’context.Itfocusesonsome of the Best Bet Climate Smart Soil Amendment options forMaizeandSorghumproductionintheSouthernAfrican Development Community (SADC) region. 

This report highlights key outputs of CCARDESA’s activities for the year 2018 which were crafted along with the five thematic areas of the Revised Medium-Term Operational Plan (20152018). The MTOP, in turn, derives its focus from key strategic regional documents such as the SADC Regional Agricultural Policy (RAP), the Regional Indicative and Strategic Development Plan (RISDP), the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP).  

Impact of APPSA support to farmers in Mozambique 

Seed markets

Impact story

In Zimbabwe, the frequency and length of dry spells during the rainy season have increased in recent years—the consequences of which include increased heat and water stress on natural ecosystems, agricultural crops and livestock, which ultimately affects agriculture communities that depend on agro-based livelihoods negatively. In addition, Zimbabwe continues to use an agro-ecological map from 1960 which divides the country into five agro-ecological regions, in spite of the fact that some of these natural regions may have changed over time. This poses a threat to agriculture, economic growth and development as the climate continues to change.

alawi is a landlocked country in Southern Africa, with an economy driven predominantly by the agricultural sector that accounts for one third of the GDP and nearly 80 percent of employment. Agriculture is considered the engine of Malawi’s economic growth since, between 2005 and 2011, more than 80 percent of the country’s total exports were agricultural commodities, primarily tobacco, sugar and tea. Tobacco alone however, represents an average 60 percent of Malawi ́s total exports.1 The manufacturing and agricultural sectors work together in their contribution to the overall growth of the economy, which in 2013/14, registered an average GDP growth rate of 5.2 percent. In particular, the 2013 growth in manufacturing was attributed to usage of higher volumes of raw agricultural inputs and a more constant supply of fuel and other raw materials.

A need to cope with the risks associated with atmospheric processes (floods, droughts, cyclones, and so forth) has always been a fact of human life (Lamb, 1995). In more recent decades, extreme weather events have increasingly come to be associated with large-scale disasters and an increasing level of economic losses. Considerable experience has accumulated at the international (as well as local and national) level on ways of coping with or managing the risks. The same cannot be said for the risks associated with anthropogenic climate change. These are new risks identified as possibilities or probabilities. Acceptance of climate change and its growing impacts has led to a stronger emphasis on the need for adaptation, as exemplified, for example, in the Bali Action Plan (adopted at the 13th Session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (UNFCCC, 2007a) and the Cancun Agreements of December 2010. The international community is thus faced with a contrast between a long record of managing disasters and the risks of ‘normal’ climate extremes, and the new problem of adaptation to anthropogenic climate change and its associated changes in variability and extremes. It has been asked how the comparatively new field of anthropogenic climate change adaptation (CCA) can benefit from the longer experience in disaster risk management (DRM). That question is a major focus of this Special Report.

This chapter assesses how countries are managing current and projected disaster risks, given knowledge of how risks are changing with observations and projections of weather and climate extremes, vulnerability and exposure, and impacts. It focuses on the design of national systems for managing such risks, the roles played by actors involved in the system, and the functions they perform, acknowledging that complementary  actions to manage risks are also taken at local and international level.