Views from two mountains: exploring climate change impacts on traditional farming communities of Eastern Africa highlands through participatory scenarios

Claudia Capitani,Fabrice Pinard,Gezahegn Berecha,Janne Heiskanen,Pekka Hurskainen,Tino Johansson,Mika Siljander,Binyam Tesfau Hailu,Robert Marchant,Amsalu Mitiku,Philip J Platts,Weyessa Garedew

doi:10.1007/s11625-018-0622-x

Abstract

African mountains are characterized by high levels of biodiversity and provide ecosystem services to millions of people. Due to steep environmental gradients, growing human populations and geographical isolation, these coupled socio-ecological systems are highly vulnerable to climate change impacts. The capacity of local stakeholders to anticipate future changes and to assess their potential impacts is paramount for enhancing adaptation and resilience. Here we apply a participatory scenario development framework in two parts of the Eastern Afromontane Biodiversity Hotspot: Taita Hills in Kenya and Jimma rural area in Ethiopia. In each area, we facilitated local stakeholders in envisioning adaptation scenarios under projected climate changes by mid-21st century, and assessed the potential impacts of these pathways on land use and land cover. In the Taita Hills, under a business-as-usual scenario, human population and activities concentrate at high elevation, triggering cascade effects on remnant forest cover, biodiversity and ecosystem services. Alternative adaptation scenarios envisage reforestation associated with either improved agricultural practices or ecosystem restoration. In the Jimma area, rising temperatures are expected to disrupt traditional coffee production under a business-as-usual scenario, resulting in the loss of coffee-forest canopies and reduction of forest-dependent biodiversity. Alternative adaptation scenarios envisage either expansion of commercial coffee plantations or expansion of agroforestry, including traditional coffee farming. In the both Taita and Jimma, adaptation pathways present trade-offs between provisioning, supporting and regulating services, and between livelihoods and biodiversity conservation. Our findings encourage the use of multidisciplinary, bottom-up approaches for developing locally tailored, climate-smart and sustainable adaptation pathways.

Highlights

Handled by Osamu Saito, United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability, Japan.Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.Extended author information available on the last page of the articleAlong with population growth (Canning et al 2015) and anthropogenic land use and land cover changes (Brink et al 2014, Schmitz et al 2014), climate change is amongst the greatest future challenges for many African countries (Niang et al 2014, Gasparatos et al 2017)
In the Taita Hills, under assumptions of increased rainfall and temperature, and increase in seasonal regime variability by mid-21st century, we developed three scenarios (Supplementary 1a): opportunistic coping strategy; integrated adaptation focused on agriculture, the ‘‘food production’’ (FP); integrated adaptation focused on forests and ecosystem services, the ‘‘green integration’’ (GI)
In the Jimma study area, under the assumptions of increased temperature, slightly higher aridity and seasonal regime variability by mid-21st century, we developed three scenarios (Supplementary 1b): adaptation efforts are failing on the long-term because of low uptake by farmers; adaptation is sustained by coffee industry expansion (CI); and adaptation is sustained by agroforestry expansion (AGF)

Summary

Introduction

The steep climatic gradients and scarcity of observation make it difficult to assess and model potential climate change impacts at local scale, and to plan adaptation strategies. These adaptation strategies require a holistic approach explicitly addressing non-climatic factors (Rasanen et al 2016), including common montane traits such as geographical isolation and remoteness and adaptive responses to altitudinal gradient which increase either vulnerability or resilience to climate. East African mountain ecosystems are highly productive agricultural areas supporting large populations that have experienced intense migration flows and extensive land cover changes over the last century (Marchant et al 2018). With higher temperatures increased potential damage by coffee berry borer Hypothenemus hampei (Jaramillo et al 2011) and coffee leaf rust Hemileia vastatrix disease (Toniutti et al 2017) are expected

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Conclusion