African food insecurity in a changing climate: The roles of science and policy
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Date
2019
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Food and Energy Security
Abstract
African population is projected to double to 2.48 billion people by 2050. The population
increase poses a serious challenge of increasing food supply to meet the future
demand. This challenge is compounded by climate change impacts on agriculture. In
this paper, how poverty contributes to household food insecurity is explored and
measures suggested to help address this challenge. To plan adaptation measures,
linkages among food insecurity, poverty, and illiteracy should be considered. For the
sub-Saharan
Africa (SSA), adaptation (focused on poverty alleviation) should be
prioritized and preferred to mitigation. Enhancement of adaptive capacity should not
only be tailored toward empowerment of women but also made highly localized to
household levels. Generally, efforts could be geared toward yield gap closure, addressing
challenges regarding food distribution, promoting non-farm
income-generating
activities, and unification of government priorities in agriculture and food
security. Government in each country of the SSA should ensure that governance
strongly embraces transparency, accountability, and integrity otherwise as it is said a
fish rots from the head down. Estimates of uncertainty in predicting future climate
and their implications on expenditure related to adaptation should to always be made
in an integrated way and reported to support actionable policies. To increase credibility
in climate prediction especially at local scales, advances toward improving climate
models (for instance by refining spatiotemporal scales, enhancing models’
capacity to reproduce observed natural variability in key climatological variables
like rainfall) should be made, and this requires support from the investment in climate
science. Science–policy interfacing is required in planning and implementation
of measures for adapting to climate change impacts. In summary, food insecurity and
persistent poverty especially in the SSA should be of direct relevance and concern at
a global scale. Thus, global collaboration in science is key to achieve food security
in the SSA.
Description
Keywords
Climate change, Food insecurity, Poverty, Science–policy interface, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)
Citation
Onyutha, C. (2019). African food insecurity in a changing climate: The roles of science and policy. Food and Energy Security, 8(1), e00160. https://doi.org/10.1002/fes3.160