Adelina Mensah

Managing Threats and Opportunities of Urbanisation for Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture in Tamale, Ghana

Urbanisation involves growth and transformation of settlements into increasingly large spatially sprawling cities. By encroaching upon agricultural land, taxing water resources and enticing rural people away from farming, urbanisation poses a threat to agriculture within both the built-up and peri-urban areas. Growing climate variability, an apparent sign of climate change, exacerbates the threat. At the same time, through an increased demand for food, the potential for affordable organic manure from urban waste and a need for efficient intensive land use urbanisation may encourage agricultural production and, thereby, enhance urban food security. Preliminary findings of an on-going inter-institutional, inter-disciplinary assessment focused on Tamale, a rapidly growing city in Ghana, show that farmers seek to manage the agricultural threats and opportunities by various ingenuous survival strategies, notably livelihoods diversification, new cultivars, and land use intensification. This paper highlights the strategies and argues that if they are nurtured and integrated into policy they would positively inform sustainable urban development planning.

A framework for identifying and selecting long term adaptation policy directions for deltas

Deltas are precarious environments experiencing significant biophysical, and socio-economic changes with the ebb and flow of seasons (including with floods and drought), with infrastructural developments (such as dikes and polders), with the movement of people, and as a result of climate and environmental variability and change. Decisions are being taken about the future of deltas and about the provision of adaptation investment to enable people and the environment to respond to the changing climate and related changes. The paper presents a framework to identify options for, and trade-offs between, long term adaptation strategies in deltas. Using a three step process, we: (1) identify current policy-led adaptations actions in deltas by conducting literature searches on current observable adaptations, potential transformational adaptations and government policy; (2) develop narratives of future adaptation policy directions that take into account investment cost of adaptation and the extent to which significant policy change/political effort is required; and (3) explore trade-offs that occur within each policy direction using a subjective weighting process developed during a collaborative expert workshop. We conclude that the process of developing policy directions for adaptation can assist policy makers in scoping the spectrum of options that exist, while enabling them to consider their own willingness to make significant policy changes within the delta and to initiate transformative change.

West Africa – Water Resources Vulnerability Using a Multidimensional Approach: Case Study of Volta Basin

Changes in climatic conditions have been evident over West Africa in the past decades. Decrease in rainfall amount led to severe droughts during the 1970s and 1980s. There has been a shift of the climatic zones in a southerly direction. Consequently, most of the Volta Basin in Burkina Faso is now located in the Sahelian and Sudano-Sahelian zones. As a consequence of instability in the rainfall pattern, many rivers have dried up, large tracts of land cover have been degraded, and the water table is drawing down.

Internationalization and Localization of the Ghana Model: Lessons Learned, Opportunities for Upscaling, and Future Directions

The significance of incorporating adaptation responses within climate and environmental change policies is well acknowledged. The involvement of diverse and relevant stakeholders is essential in the identification, characterization, and implementation of adaptation measures for enhancing resilience and reducing vulnerability. The “Ghana Model” was developed through transdisciplinary and solutions-oriented sustainability science approaches that incorporated collaboration between researchers, scientists, development practitioners in public and private sectors, as well as governmental and nongovernmental organizations under the Enhancing Resilience to Climate and Ecosystem Change in Semi-Arid Africa: An Integrated Approach (CECAR-Africa) project. In this concluding chapter, we discuss the opportunities that exist, and the efforts that can be made, to upscale the Ghana Model to other sub-Saharan African countries with similar socioecological conditions. The lessons learned from designing and implementing the Ghana Model are discussed, and the proposed future actions designed to ensure sustainability are considered.