Abstract
In most parts of sub-Saharan Africa, precipitation is impacted by climate change. In some countries like Cameroon, it is still not clear how maize, millet and rice will respond to changes in growing season precipitation. This work examines the exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity of the above crops to droughts at both the national and sub-national scale. Crop yield data were culled from FAOSTAT while growing season precipitation data were culled from the database of UNDP/Oxford University and the climate portal of the World Bank. Adaptive capacity proxies (literacy, and poverty rate) were collected from KNOEMA and the African Development Bank. The analysis was performed using the vulnerability index equation. Nationally, millet has the lowest vulnerability and rice has the highest. At the sub-national scale, northern maize has the highest vulnerability followed by western highland rice. It is observed that when scales change, the crops that are vulnerable also change. However, at both levels vulnerability has an inverse relationship with adaptive capacity.
Highlights
According to the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) temperatures are projected to increase in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) by between 1.5–2.5 ◦C by 2050 based on the RCP 4.5 scenario [1]
The results show that northern maize has the highest vulnerability index of about 1.21 while southern maize has a vulnerability index of 0.51 (Table 2)
From a policy and farming livelihood perspective, this study suggests the modernization of Cameroon’s irrigation infrastructure, use of mixed farming, farm input, soil additives, economic viability and intermittent/mid-season draining to reduce the vulnerability of rice
Summary
According to the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) temperatures are projected to increase in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) by between 1.5–2.5 ◦C by 2050 based on the RCP 4.5 scenario [1]. SSA has witnessed increase in annual surface air temperatures between 0.2–2.0 ◦C [2]. These temperature trends have been associated with changes in growing season precipitation, reflected mainly in unreliable precipitation. These trends have triggered the vulnerability of cropping systems in SSA [2,3,4,5,6]. Droughts have impacted the mean crop growing season precipitation in Cameroon which stands at around 200 mm for maize, rice, and millet [5]. Even though droughts are recurrent in Cameroon, the most recent and significant droughts were recorded between 2012–2015 in which tons of maize, beans, millet, and rice seeds and seedlings were damaged [3,4,5,6]
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