Adaptation to climate change or non-climatic stressors in semi-arid regions? Evidence of gender differentiation in three agrarian districts of Ghana
Date
2016-08
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Elsevier
Abstract
With the increasing impacts of climate change in Africa, a relationship between rainfall and yields in semi-arid Ghana has been observed. Drawing insights from three agrarian societies in the semi-arid region of Ghana using qualitative research methods, the study reports how people currently deal with climate variability as insight on how they will deal with climate change in the future. The findings indicate wide gender inequality in decision making processes and land access resulting from patriarchal local customs and institutions that shape adaptation responses of different vulnerable social groups to climatic or non-climatic stressors. Different adaptation practices of groups indicate that both climatic and non-climatic stressors shape the kind of responses that groups adopt. From the current adaptation practices, efforts to improve adaptation to future climate change at local levels must give attention to the nexus of both climatic and non-climatic stressors, gender, differential vulnerabilities and other subjectivities that produce a particular adaptation practice in a given place.
Description
This work was carried out under the Adaptation at Scale in Semi-Arid Regions project(ASSAR). ASSAR is one of five reserarch programs funded under the Collaborative Adaptation Reseasrch Initiative in African and Asisa (CARIAA), with financial support from the UK Government's Department for International Development (DfID) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC),Canada (107640-001).The views expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of DfID and IDRC or its Board of Governors. Special thanks go to the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) projects secretariat in Ghana for the support in linking our research with the CCAFS district platform chairpersons. We also would like to acknowledge the support of Stephen Omari in fieldwork data collection as well as chairpersons of CCAFS district platforms.We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their comments.
item.page.type
Journal Article (peer-reviewed)
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Keywords
ADAPTATION, AGRARIAN, CLIMATE CHANGE, GENDER, GHANA, SEMI-ARID
Citation
Abubakari Ahmed, Elaine T. Lawson, Adelina Mensah, Chris Gordon, Jon Padgham, Adaptation to climate change or non-climatic stressors in semi-arid regions? Evidence of gender differentiation in three agrarian districts of Ghana, Environmental Development, vol. 20, 2016, pages 45-58, ISSN 2211-4645, (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211464516300884).