Abstract
Despite large increases in national cereal production in recent decades, Ethiopia continues to experience regular acute food insecurity crises, often associated with drought events. However, the meteorology of these events is poorly defined and local populations frequently experience food insecurity crises in years when national rainfall and cereal production totals are high. Therefore, looking at national, or even to some extent sub-national, rainfall variability is a misappropriation of climate as a causal factor in food insecurity in Ethiopia. The distinction between ‘drought’ as catch-all driver of food insecurity and a more nuanced view of the relationship between rainfall variability and food security is necessary both for addressing food insecurity now and for interpreting long-term climate model projections. The on-going recurrence of acute food insecurity is a feature of the heterogeneity of climate and climate variability in Ethiopia, but only in the context of a food system dominated by smallholder farming and climate-sensitive livelihoods. Climate variability has the greatest adverse impact in the most marginal livelihood zones in the drier east of the country. Increasing the resilience of smallholder farmers and pastoralists to climate variability and improvements in early warning and disaster risk response could reduce the frequency and severity of food security crises. However, unless the food system in Ethiopia undergoes transformational adaptation, food insecurity crises will continue to occur, and the opportunity to achieve zero hunger by 2030 will be missed.
Highlights
Ethiopia suffers from both chronic, long-term food insecurity (WFP and CSA 2014), and the regular incidence of severe food insecurity crises, often associated with drought events (Guha-Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.Climatic Change (2017) 144:317–328Sapir et al 2015)
This conclusion is supported by a more in-depth study by (Bewket 2009) which looked at the relationship between rainfall variability and crop production in Ethiopia in more detail, and found annual rainfall to be weakly correlated with cereal production
One implication from this is that large-scale climate trends may not be a useful means of assessing the impacts of weather on future food security, as it relates to production, regardless of the confidence, or otherwise, in climate change projections
Summary
Ethiopia suffers from both chronic, long-term food insecurity (WFP and CSA 2014), and the regular incidence of severe food insecurity crises, often associated with drought events A large number of studies have been undertaken to evaluate how climate, climate variability and change could affect food security in Ethiopia (Devereux and Sussex 2000; Funk et al 2008; Oxfam 2010; Mahoo et al 2013; Hagos et al 2014; WFP 2014; Jirata et al 2016). In each of these studies, no formal definition of what constitutes a drought is given, so it is not necessarily clear that these ‘drought’ events have the same meteorological characteristics This lack of definition for drought is a problem, because it makes it difficult to evaluate what climate model projections mean for longer term food security outcomes. The EMDAT database contains information about disasters (rather than hazard) which are measured in terms of the impact on people This data is rather subjective, and not reported in a standardised way, but is the best information available that records the occurrence of such events. Because it is the rainfall data of choice for food security activity in the country, CHIRPS rainfall data is used throughout this study
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