Climate Change A Burning Issue For Ethiopia

Abstract: This study uses the Ricardian approach to analyze the impact of climate change on Ethiopian agriculture and to describe farmer adaptations to varying environmental factors. The study analyzes data from 11 of the country's 18 agro-ecological zones, representing more than 74 percent of the country, and survey of 1,000 farmers from 50 districts. Regressing of net revenue on climate, household, and soil variables show that these variables have a significant impact on the farmers' net revenue per hectare. The study carries out a marginal impact analysis of increasing temperature and changing precipitation across the four seasons. In addition, it examines the impact of uniform climate scenarios on farmers' net revenue per hectare. Additionally, it analyzes the net revenue impact of predicted climate scenarios from three models for the years 2050 and 2100. In general, the results indicate that increasing temperature and decreasing precipitation are both damaging to Ethiopian agriculture. Although the analysis did not incorporate the carbon fertilization effect, the role of technology, or the change in prices for the future, significant information for policy-making can be extracted.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, no environmental issue is of such truly global magnitude as the issue of climate change. The poorer, developing countries are the least equipped to adapt to the potential effects of climate change, although most of them have played an insignificant role in causing it. African countries are amongst the poorest of the developing countries. This book presents the issues of most relevance to Africa, such as past and present climate, desertification, biomass burning and its implications for atmospheric chemistry and climate, energy generation, sea-level rise, ENSO-induced drought and flood, adaptation, disaster risk reduction, the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol (especially the Clean Development Mechanism), capacity-building, and sustainable development. It provides a comprehensive and up-to-date review of these and many other issues, with chapters by the leading experts from a range of disciplines. Climate Change and Africa will prove to be an invaluable reference for all researchers and policy makers with an interest in climate change and Africa.

This study deals with three interrelated problems. First, it pursues the quest for local knowledge to understand climate variability and change at local levels. Due to controversies, uncertainties, skepticism and embedded economic and political interests in the climate change discourse, effective world collective action is more likely to delay for quite some time to come. Moreover, as climate change discourse remains very weak at engaging local knowledge, policies that emanate from the discourse might be less responsive to local climate problems both in terms of policy ingredients and time frame. So, having highlighting the paramount importance of local knowledge, this study documents and critically analyzes this knowledge system among subsistence farmers in Ethiopia. Secondly, it analyzes the economic impacts of climate variability and change and adaptation through quantitative methods with a special focus on crop production. Finally, it analyzes the factors that influence adaptive behavior. In so doing, it challenges the traditional approach of adaptation research and brings in a conceptual framework borrowed from psychosocial theory and empirically tests the approach in explaining adaptive behavior of farmers.

Vegetation Dynamics, Changing Ecosystems and Human Responsibility provides an overview of vegetation dynamics, which is the science of natural, near-natural, and human-influenced changes in vegetation over time and space. We can find chapters about almost every viewpoint of this very diverse segment of our science and in connection with almost every main type of terrestrial ecosystem.

This book collects wide-ranging contributions such as case studies, reviews, reports on technological developments, outputs of research/studies, and examples of successful projects, presenting current knowledge and raising awareness to help the agriculture and forestry sectors find solutions for mitigating climate variability and adapting to change. It brings the topic of ecosystem services closer to education and learning, as targeted by the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020. Climate change and its impacts on agriculture and agroforestry have been observed across the world during the last 50 years. Increasing temperatures, droughts, biotic stresses and the impacts of extreme events have continuously decreased agroforestry systems’ resilience to the effects of climate change. As such, there is a need to adapt farming and agroforestry systems so as to make them better able to handle ever-changing climate conditions, and to preserve habitats and ecosystems services.

This book is basically associated with doctoral research. At present climate change become a serious environmental issues in the world. Farmer, pastoralists and marginalized people are more vulnerable to climate related problems because agriculture as well as livestock resources totally depended upon climate like temperature and rainfall. Livestock is a significant contributor to economic and social development in Ethiopia at the household as well as national level. Due to climate change induced hazards like recurring of drought leads the pastoralist’s livestock’s in to death and makes the pastoralist’s to be more vulnerable.