Abstract
Climate resilience in subsistence agricultural communities depends strongly on the robustness and effective management of the agricultural natural resource base. For this reason, adaptation planning efforts frequently focus on natural resource conservation as the primary motivation for and primary outcome of adaptation activities. Here, we present an analysis of the sustainability of community based adaptation (CBA) activities in 20 community based organizations (CBO) that were established in the Blue Nile Highlands of Ethiopia in order to promote resilience to climate change. CBA sustainability was assessed through multi-criteria analysis using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Sustainability was considered for social, institutional, technical, financial, and environmental dimensions, with second-order indicators or factors defined for each dimension. According to this analysis, CBA efforts of two thirds of the COBs studied were found to be unsustainable in all dimensions and CBA efforts of the remaining CBOs were found to be at risk of unsustainability. A number of barriers to CBA sustainability were identified, including inadequacies in community participation, training of local community members, local government commitment, farmer capacity, and bureaucratic efficiency. Participatory evaluation of CBA, however, revealed that many of these barriers can be attributed to the decision to use conservation of natural resources as the primary framework for CBA activities. Based on this evaluation, new efforts have been developed that use markets as the entry and exit points for sustainability activities. Lessons learned in this project are relevant for CBA efforts in other agricultural regions of the developing world.
Highlights
Climate change (CC) has occurred across much of Ethiopia, since the 1970s, at a rate that is variable but broadly consistent with wider African and global trends
Community organizing for adaptation to climate change in itself increases resilience to climate risks by strengthening and expanding social networks and links with donors and supporting institutions [9] and by having communities take responsibility for environmental and social problems rather than creating a reliance on external actors to assume these responsibilities on behalf of the communities
They focused on vulnerability reduction and adaptation by establishing community-based projects and took as a foundational principle that success in community based adaptation and sustainable development is a function of stakeholder capacity to plan and implement projects relevant to their needs
Summary
Climate change (CC) has occurred across much of Ethiopia, since the 1970s, at a rate that is variable but broadly consistent with wider African and global trends. The assigned sustainability score was determined subjectively by these experts, taking into account both participation rates and effectiveness of implementation relative to expectation These scores were averaged with equal weights within each dimension. The overall sustainability of CBA efforts at each CBO was calculated by averaging acceptance rates for all indicators within each of the five sustainability dimensions—social, institutional, technical, financial, and environmental—and summing up the factors proportional to the relative weights of the dimensions. These weights approximate the relative importance of each dimension to achieving the aims of the CBOs. Weighted social sustainability scores ranged from 0.04 (Meleya, Addis, Worke and Zumander) to. While financial sustainability ranged from 0.01–0.1, the environmental sustainability indicator ranged from 0.03–0.07 with median values of 0.054 and 0.046, respectively, out of a possible weighted maximum of 0.1 each
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