Vulnerability of smallholder agriculture to environmental change in North-Western Ghana and implications for development planning

ABSTRACT

Smallholder agriculture, particularly food crop production in northern Ghana’s savannah ecological zones, is faced with several environmental change stressors and risks. However, most studies on the vulnerability of agriculture focus on socio-economic indicators with little attention to the comparative analysis of smallholder crop production’s vulnerability to different environmental stressors. This paper draws on a mixed-method research design for analyzing smallholder farmer vulnerability to various environmental stressors in the Wa Municipality. Farmers identified these stressors to include climatic factors (drought, rainstorm, and flood) and non-climatic factors (sand mining and bush fires). The results reveal vulnerability at two levels. First, smallholder farmers are more vulnerable to non-climatic environmental stressors than climatic factors. Secondly, crop-specific vulnerability analysis reveals that legumes and tubers, including beans, groundnuts, and yam, are more susceptible to climatic stressors than cereal crops. The paper underscores that urbanization and its associated patterns of consumption in housing demand are the primary drivers of these emergent vulnerability patterns. The paper emphasizes that an integrated approach to Environmental Change Adaptation Planning (ECAP) is imperative for reducing agriculture’s vulnerability to environmental change in the Municipality.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental change
• stressors
• vulnerability
• smallholder agriculture
• Environmental Change Adaptation Planning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Endogenous Development Service (EDS Ghana): [grant number Not available]; Global Disaster Preparedness Center (Response 2 Resilience), USA: [grant number Not available].

Notes on contributors

Emmanuel Kanchebe Derbile

Dr. Emmanuel Kanchebe Derbile is an Associate Professor in Development Planning at the S.D Dombo University of Business and Integrated Development Studies(SDD-UBIDS), formerly, University for Development Studies, Wa, Ghana. He holds a Ph.D in Development Studies from the University of Bonn, Germany, an M.Sc. in Development Planning and Management from the University of Dortmund and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana, and a BA in Integrated Development Studies from the University for Development Studies, Ghana. He also holds a Certificate in Management of Development Organizations from the St. Francis Xavier University, Canada. He has over 20 years work experience in academia, spanning teaching, research and development extension. He has researched and published in areas of environmental change, especially vulnerability to climate change and the role of local knowledge systems and livelihoods in climate change adaptation planning. He is also Director of the West African Centre for Sustainable Rural Transformation at SDD-UBIDS.

Dennis Chirawurah

Dr. Dennis Chirawurah is a practice-based community development scholar with over fifteen years' experience in teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in Community Health & Development, and Disaster Resilience Leadership. Currently, he is the Research Technical Assistance Center (RTAC) West Africa regional network coordinator, supporting the leverage of technical and research expertise of the higher education community in West Africa. The RTAC funded by USAID to provide scientific and research-based, technical assistance to support USAID programmes is a consortium composed of nine core partners and eight resource partners based at the University of Chicago, USA. He is a Fellow of the Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy at Tulane University and director the West Africa Resilience Innovation Lab at the UDS, one of the four regional innovation labs created by the ResilientAfrica Networks' dedicated to research into resilience of communities and innovations for building community resilience. He has demonstrable competence in balancing teaching, research and community service.

Francis Xavier Naab

Francis Xavier Naab is currently a Junior Researcher at the Centre for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Germany. He is also a staff member of the SD Dombo University of Business and Integrated Development Studies (SDD-UBIDS), Ghana. He supports the running of the DAAD sponsored West African Centre for Sustainable Rural Transformation Project at SDD-UBIDS. He has background training in Development Studies and Development Policy Panning. His research interests focus on policy studies and research, youth aspirations, local development, gender, climate change and sustainable rural transformation.