Abstract
The objective of this work is to develop a simple methodology for high resolution crop suitability analysis under current and future climate, easily applicable and useful in Least Developed Countries. The approach addresses both regional planning in the context of climate change projections and pre-emptive short-term rural extension interventions based on same-year agricultural season forecasts, while implemented with off-the-shelf resources. The developed tools are applied operationally in a case-study developed in three regions of Guinea-Bissau and the obtained results, as well as the advantages and limitations of methods applied, are discussed. In this paper we show how a simple approach can easily generate information on climate vulnerability and how it can be operationally used in rural extension services.
Highlights
The natural suitability of lands for agriculture is of crucial importance in developing regions where low-input subsistence agriculture and local crop production determine food security and economic return [1]
The method developed to estimate agro-ecological suitability at a given location is based on a) crop parameters, which define the optimal, sub-optimal and inadequate environmental conditions for the growth of a given crop; b) a computational assessment of a climate suitability index based on the crop parameters and on climate data; c) a computational assessment of an edaphic suitability index based on the crop parameters and on soil data; and d) the integration of the climate and edaphic suitability to infer the agro-ecological suitability and other relevant indicators
The developed Agro-Ecological Zoning (AEZ) methodology and tools are applied in Guinea-Bissau for the eighteen selected crops using current climate conditions, and conditions projected by the MPI model
Summary
The natural suitability of lands for agriculture is of crucial importance in developing regions where low-input subsistence agriculture and local crop production determine food security and economic return [1]. This is especially so in Least Developed Countries (LDC) where vulnerable populations rely almost entirely on rain-fed agriculture for food and cash and are highly exposed to the impacts of climate and market changes [2,3,4].
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