Smart integration of animals and crops to survive climate change in Africa

The aim of the cluster is to combine research on the impacts of climate change on crop and livestock systems to evaluate risks to smallholder systems as a whole, and to develop appropriate adaptation.
We focus on risks of failure of the crop or animal sides of the system, from adverse weather and pests (crop failure), or undernutrition and disease (livestock failure). Our premise is that a key component of household resilience to climate change is integration of crops and livestock, such that less affected components enable shocks to be overcome. This is well recognised in principle, yet research on effects of climate change have tended to focus either on specific components or on general social and economic resilience. By integrating scientific advances in prediction of specific climate risks, we will be better able to identify strategies that buffer risks to one component by utilising contrasting risk profiles in others. Moreover, we seek to tap into decision support systems for climate-smart agriculture that have arisen from underpinning GCRF projects but are directed at specific components, to build shared platforms for communication and capacity building around climate risks for strategic and real-time applications.

Smallholder farming is crucial to the livelihoods of rural populations throughout Africa, but is experiencing many challenges. Climate change is making nutritional resources from grazing more unpredictable, and at the same time increasing threats from pests and parasites, for both livestock and crops. Investing in greater inputs to stave off these threats is out of the question for most subsistence farmers and is unsustainable. Better ways of running integrated animal-plant systems are urgently needed. To that end, this project seeks to build on successful previous work, in which targeted treatment of individual sheep and goats within a herd achieved substantial uplift in health and productivity with much lower input costs than standard whole-herd treatment. Further improvements to the system would be to replace chemicals with plants shown to reduce parasite burdens, which grow locally and could be cultivated or sustainably harvested.

Integration of livestock and crop production can increase resilience to climate change, but most projects have addressed one or other arm of the system. The Cluster proposes to cross that boundary at scientific, policy/NGO planning, and farm level, and hence achieve greater synergy between existing GCRF projects. As a result of this project, tools will be created for rapid evaluation of and adaptation to climate-related threats to smallholder farms throughout Africa, to support sustainable production and food security in the poorest areas. The tools will be evaluated in Malawi alongside existing projects, with a particular aim to evaluate how multi-channel (plant-animal health-production) information and decision support systems can be best designed and delivered to users at policy, advisor and farmer levels. This will enhance delivery and impact of the tools proposed in the current project, and also provide an evidence-based framework for combining advances in other areas and supporting effective uptake and application by farmers who are unable to reliably access bespoke professional advice.

The project directly addresses the UKRI Global Challenge Area "Equitable access to sustainable development", specifically by targeting its first sub-priority: secure and resilient food systems (see ODA compliance questionnaire). We showed in previous work that targeted selective treatment of parasites can be applied by resource-poor smallholder farmers; predicting risk would help them further by focusing monitoring and treatment, while nesting these predictions in a suite of predictive decision support tools covering other major climate-driven risks to smallholder farms would widen their utility. Because the parasite forecasts are the best developed in our hands, we will use them as a case study and an opportunity to explore and scope out decision support tool application for climate-smart farming, teaming up with the larger AFRICAP programme. Interventions in the current project would help to refine and apply local solutions that simultaneously improve better integration of plant and animal production on smallholder farms, and support household resilience to climate change. Outcomes will be improved production and flexibility to continue production under climate variation, impacting directly on rural livelihoods; the project seeks also to map those positive livelihood impacts.