Climate Change

Hello all,

In the last two weeks, I have spoken about how an ecosystem services approach may aid in policy applications to inform decision-making in biodiversity conservation and land use change. In the final post of this blog, I will speak about how an ecosystem services approach may be used to understand climate change.

Water and Food

Africa is undisputedly one of the least resilient continents when it comes to climate change due to its spatial location relatively in the lower latitudes. The immediate impact would be the changes in water levels through the differing water bodies, with Africa likely experiencing more intense and less frequent precipitation events, leading to a total alteration of the present river regime (Magadza, 1994). Some presently perennial water bodies may even be lost to climate change due to a general reduction in river output, which may hit Africa as a continent most due to its reliance on direct ecosystem services for livelihoods - water consumption, collection of water from these rivers for sanitary purposes, and pollution regulation for heavily contaminated rural areas.

On top of climate change affecting water consumption, a reduction in river output is likely to directly affect food production negatively. Increases in global temperatures within Africa has also been found to cause up to a 30% decrease in crop yields (Parry et al. 2004), and a study on impact of climate change on fisheries identify coastal west and central Africa as the most vulnerable (Allison et al. 2009). Most African countries depend on direct ecosystem services provided by subsistence crops for their livelihoods and fish stocks as a source of protein and cash earnings, for example 45% of animal protein in Congo is from fish. Negative effects of climate change on crop yield and fish production may therefore severely threaten the livelihoods of people in these countries (Egoh et al. 2012), and force migration in search for food.

Although most crop modelling studies agree on overall agricultural yield declines, these predictions can be very uncertain spatially. For example, East Africa has been cited to agree on rainfall increases in most seasons through the GCMs. Increased rainfall may promote net primary productivity and carbon storage due to the shift towards a more tree-dominated ecosystem, improving ecosystem conditions for greater agricultural output (Doherty et al. 2010). A fundamental shift to a different ecosystem however, means that trade-offs are bound to occur in the lost ecosystem. At this point, by using the mapping and modelling approaches mentioned in my previous post in addition to crop modelling, it may be possible to derive whether such ecosystem service changes are for the better in this particular area - supplementing a monetary valuation to this approach may then allow us to derive whether climate change is economically beneficial to a region. Safeguarding these ecosystem services provisions is arguably in line with many governments' objectives to improve the livelihoods of their citizens, and should therefore lie at the forefront of policy-making.

In my next post, I would conclude the contents of this blog. Thank you for all the comments thus far!