Participatory modelling for climate change adaptation: the poultry sector in Nigeria

Abstract

ABSTRACT Strategies for agricultural climate change adaptation are needed to ensure that sub-Saharan Africa can continue to feed itself, given its rapidly growing population and the expected impacts of climate change on food production. The poultry sector is an important component of the African food system, but national climate change adaptation plans in many countries fail to take into account the specific contextual challenges faced by poultry producers. We developed a participatory system dynamics modelling tool to involve stakeholders from the poultry sector in Nigeria in analyzing how climate impacts would affect the sector, with the goal of generating insights for state (sub-national) and national scale policy makers. A second goal of the exercise was to facilitate social learning and knowledge sharing on adaptation strategies among the stakeholders. Given the high uncertainty of the conditions surrounding the Nigerian poultry sector, the model's use is primarily as a discussion tool for poultry sector stakeholders, including policy makers, to share concerns and develop adaptation strategies. It served this purpose, as evidenced by the creation of a manual for poultry producers from the exercise. Similar stakeholder engagement efforts can stimulate knowledge sharing around climate change adaptation for problems around which limited data and high uncertainty exist. Key policy insights Participatory system dynamics modelling is shown to be a useful tool for integrating national and community-level priorities for policy and management under climate change in the Nigerian poultry sector. Effective climate change adaptation will require building resilience to large-scale external drivers such as global trade dynamics, which are highly influential in the system. In order to effectively move from planning to implementation, climate change adaptation processes must facilitate social learning and knowledge sharing around the long-term consequences of policy and management choices.