Abstract
Smallholder farmers dependent on rain-fed agriculture are particularly vulnerable to extreme climate events and, therefore, it is necessary to identify adaptive measures that would increase farmer resilience to these shocks. The management options in a low-input system, like forest coffee (Coffea arabica), are limited and there are several factors out of farmers’ control driving their vulnerability to changing climatic conditions. These can relate to social structures and landscape factors, which can interact to reduce farmers’ adaptive capacity, creating a state of contextual vulnerability. We explored the potential synergies of this interaction across elevation, patch area and shade management gradients for smallholder coffee farms around the UNESCO Yayu Coffee Forest Biosphere Reserve in Ethiopia before, during and immediately following the 2015/16 El Niño. We documented a dramatic collapse in coffee yields across all farms, resulting in coffee incomes 29.5% ± 18.0% and 19.5% ± 10.0% of 2014 incomes in 2015 and 2016, respectively. We identified farms at elevations between 1500 and 1600 m with canopy openness between 40% and 45% as being consistently low yielding over our study period. We found these farmers had the highest rates of income diversification and, therefore, were already exhibiting adaptive capacity. Farmers with the largest income losses were spatially concentrated between 1600 and 1700 m, located in larger patch areas with lower canopy openness. Farmers at this elevation have access to poor infrastructure, restrictions on shade management and reported higher dependence on income from coffee, indicating an interaction of biotic and social factors exacerbating their vulnerability. Unfortunately, due to a nationally declared state of emergency, we were unable to survey farmers on the adaptive measures they undertook; therefore, we are limited in assessing their resilience. However, we do show the importance of considering both biotically and socially-mediated influences for assessing smallholder vulnerability, particularly barriers to diversifying incomes.
Highlights
Vulnerability, on the other hand, has been primarily defined as the susceptibility of a system to respond negatively to an external stress generally driven by a lack of adaptive capacity
This paper aims to contribute to the development of such an interdisciplinary understanding of vulnerability, including how vulnerability can be spatially concentrated through the interaction of biophysical and social structures, by using an examination of the impact of a climate shock on coffee yields in southwestern Ethiopia around a UNESCO biosphere reserve
As we know these farms to be lightly managed, we focused on the influences of elevation, forest patch area, soil condition and canopy gap as predictors of low shrub productivity, whether this dynamic remained consistent throughout the climate shock and if it predicts whether farmers are already undertaking adaptive measures
Summary
The concept of resilience, though utilized by several disciplines, was largely drawn from ecology [1], and applied to the development of the related fields of sustainability science and social-ecological systems (SES) analysis [2]. It provides a conceptual foundation for grappling with the hard to predict responses of complex systems undergoing stress acting over different spatial and temporal scales, and can be qualitatively or quantitatively assessed as the level of perturbation a system can experience while maintaining its overall functioning. Exposure relates to the magnitude of stress a system undergoes, sensitivity is the degree to which that perturbation affects that system and the ability to respond to that perturbation is its adaptive capacity. As O’Brien et al [5] explain, framing vulnerability as contextual allows SESs to be analyzed as a whole, how biophysically- and socially-mediated factors can interact to reduce adaptive capacity as opposed to focusing on how impacts of an external perturbation manifest and, inadvertently create a focus on technical interventions
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