Building Resilience in Ethiopia's Awassa region to Drought (BREAD)

Droughts in Sub-Saharan Africa have been exacerbated by the current El Niño event, resulting in well publicised risks of famine in the worst affected regions and food shortages elsewhere. This project will combine data collected in the Awassa region of Ethiopia before, during and after the current El Niño to quantify the impacts to locally produced food and farmer livelihoods. Our primary aim will be to assess biophysical interventions that promoted resilient food production during this El Niño event, with a strong social sciences input so that societal acceptance and impacts of beneficial interventions can be assessed. We have assembled a UK-Ethiopia project team with long-standing expertise working in the region. It involves experts in all aspects of natural, economic and social sciences.
We will test two over-arching hypotheses: (1) the short term extreme drought associated with the current El Niño will have a long term impact on communities, their farming systems and their soils; and (2) resilience to this drought can only be built through interventions that consider both biophysical and socio-economic factors. A major intervention that we will explore is sustainable soil management through organic residue incorporation, taking into account resource conflicts with animal feed and household fuel use that worsen during times of extreme drought. We explore the knock-on impacts of land management to the availability of green water (stored in soil) and blue water (abstracted from ground and surface water sources). Further data on soil fertility will be measured across a range of 36 case-study farms located within two districts that are different distances from water supplies. The project will allow for crop and soil data collected for two years before the current El Niño to be supplemented with continued measurements of post-drought resilience. Previous data were collected in the ESPA funded project 'Alternative Carbon Investments in Ecosystems for Poverty Alleviation'. Modelling of crop and soil responses will allow us to upscale the impacts of land management interventions.
Our outputs will be translated into outcomes through engagement with farmers, local and regional government and other stakeholders, both throughout the research and once the research is complete. As recently as December 2015, we met directly with these stakeholders, using well-established networks developed by our Ethiopian partners. Awassa is not the region in Sub-Saharan Africa that is worst affected by El Niño, but we argue that its relatively high population density, supported by food availability during good growing seasons, makes it particularly important. Moreover, land in the worst affected regions is so infertile that interventions may have limited impact, whereas in Awassa and similar more fertile regions of Ethiopia, interventions could promote greater agricultural productivity to supply national food demands during extreme events. We have already observed that Awassa houeholds spend more time collecting water and have been able to collect less due to pump breakdowns as groundwater levels get deeper during this drought. Yields have plummeted, affecting the earnings of subsistence farmer. Interviews conducted in December 2015 showed that farmers attempt to cope with the situation through short term strategies such as selling off livestock which will have long term consequences for the farming system in the area. The outcomes of this research will contribute towards increasing awareness of the impacts of drought in the region, and improving resilience of farming systems to drought. This will help farmers to employ better coping strategies for drought and to cope for longer, requiring less interventions and avoiding catastrophic harvest failures. In the long term, this will contribute towards better food security and nutrition, improved resilience and reduced risks associated with extreme droughts from future El Niño events.

The project is aiming to create positive impacts at several scales from the local and regional to the national and international through knowledge exchange with relevant stakeholders and decision makers. The two key developmental outputs from the project are (1) better understanding of the impact of drought events on communities, their soils and agricultural production in Southern Ethiopia; and (2) recommended methods for building resilience to drought. Potential wider outcomes from these project outputs are respectively (1) increased awareness of the impacts of droughts and coping strategies, allowing farmers to plan their livelihoods more effectively, and local and regional governments to provide better, more targeted support to farmers when needed; and (2) improved resilience to droughts of farming systems and communities, allowing them to cope with the drought for longer before requiring interventions. Many farmers in Halaba and other districts across Ethiopia are dependent on government interventions for survival during drought events at the same time as employing a mix of their own coping mechanisms with long term impacts. There is a clear need for research that will improve planning for droughts and improve resilience of the farming community and assist them in their attempts at coping with droughts without creating negative long term impacts
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These outputs will be translated into outcomes through engagement with farmers, local and regional government and other stakeholders, both throughout the research and once the research is complete. Stakeholders will be consulted at the beginning of the research to identify the impacts of the drought on the community and existing coping strategies. This will include identifying what factors influence choice of coping strategies, and what are the short, medium and long-term consequences of these coping strategies for their livelihoods, the environment and future resilience. The findings on the economic and biophysical impacts of these effects will be highlighted in stakeholder workshops. Potential resilience building methods will be co-designed with farmers, and local and regional government. At the end of the research, recommended methods that have most potential to build resilience will be summarised in policy factsheets, to be launched at a stakeholder workshop. Recommended changes to farming practices will be laid out in farming practice leaflets, and handed out to farmers at community days in the Halaba district. Resilience building methods that are translatable to the national context will be presented to the appropriate government departments in Ethiopia; those that are internationally relevant will be highlighted in a briefing to DFID by UA and JHI.

In addition, the project will contribute to an overall better understanding of issues of resilience, vulnerability and climatic hazards in developing country contexts. Findings will be published in peer reviewed academic journals and thereby contribute to continued academic dialogue on these issues, and to the identification of potential future research questions.