Forschungszentrum für Globale Ernährungssicherung und Ökosysteme

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hohpublica.uni-hohenheim.de/handle/123456789/17148

Englisch: Hohenheim Research Center for Global Food Security and Ecosystems (GFE)

Homepage: https://gfe.uni-hohenheim.de/en

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Coping and social cohesion mechanisms in addressing climate change and land degradation in Ghana
(2025) Amankwah, Harry Quaye; Ndah, Hycenth Tim; Schuler, Johannes; Abdulai, Alhassan Lansah; Knierim, Andrea
The West Africa sub-region is faced with major interlinked challenges in ensuring sustainable livelihoods in the context of climate change and land degradation. To ensure sustainable food production and resource use, agriculture needs to be resilient through the application of responsive adaptation and coping strategies. While many studies have explored coping and adaptation strategies employed by farmers, little attention has been paid to the farmers’ indigenous practices and the role of social cohesion mechanisms. Using the sustainable livelihood framework, this study addressed this gap by exploring coping strategies and social cohesion mechanisms used by smallholder farmers in northern Ghana. It made use of a mixed-method approach, including a household survey, focus group discussions, expert interviews, field observations, and key informant interviews. Data was collected from 60 households in 6 communities across 3 districts in the study region. The results showed that social assets such as membership of self-help groups were the most important source of coping, particularly for the most vulnerable households. Such membership enabled farmers to secure micro-loans and receive aid from fellow members during extreme climate events such as floods. Farmers’ tacit knowledge emerged as pivotal in coping with climate change and enhancing soil fertility, encompassing traditional weather forecasting, the making of bio-pesticides, and sustainable land management (SLM) practices such as ridge and bund creation as well as intercropping. Key coping practices reported by the study participants included reduction of food consumption, off-farm jobs, selling livestock, charcoal making and reliance on remittances. The results further revealed that social cohesion mechanisms or collective action play a key role in helping farmers cope and adapt to climate change while improving soil fertility. Social cohesion is mainly reflected in two different structures depending on gender. While diverse challenges of innovation adoption exist, socio-cultural barriers differ by gender. The study recommends the integration of farmers throughout the innovation development process and proposes the need for a concerted effort to strengthen land tenure security policies, ensuring equitable access to farmlands for all genders.
Sheltered by trees: long-term yield dynamics in temperate alley cropping agroforestry with changing water availability
(2025) Koch, Olef; Moore, Jennifer; Hörl, Jakob; Cormann, Michael; Gayler, Sebastian; Lewandowski, Iris; Marhan, Sven; Munz, Sebastian; Pflugfelder, Markus; Piepho, Hans-Peter; Schneider, Julia; von Cossel, Moritz; Weinand, Tanja; Winkler, Bastian; Schweiger, Andreas H.
As warm season droughts increase in frequency due to climate change, causing severe yield losses especially among cereal crops, European agriculture is in dire need of adaptation. While agroforestry is widely regarded as a key adaptation measure, little is known on how yield performance is influenced by changing water availability in temperate regions. Therefore, we assessed the yield dynamics of five winter crops (winter wheat, triticale, winter barley, winter pea, and rapeseed) during seven growing seasons (2012 to 2023) in a well-established (since 2007) alley cropping agroforestry trial site in Southwestern Germany. The trial integrated three different agroforestry practices in a randomized block design: (i) willow short-rotation coppice, (ii) walnut trees for nut production, and (iii) diverse hedgerows. The relationship between crop yield and climatic water balance was analyzed using a linear mixed-model. In this unique long-term comparison, we demonstrate that individual alley cropping practices exhibited distinct yield patterns with increased distance to tree rows. In contrast to the willow short rotation coppice, walnut and hedgerows did not evoke significant winter crop yield declines at proximity. While in the walnut plots yields did not significantly vary with distance to tree rows, yields adjacent to hedge rows declined significantly towards the alley center. Moreover, tree rows contributed to stable crop yields under fluctuating water availability in their proximity and up to the alley center on their leeward side while yields significantly varied with changing climatic water balance on the windward side. Our results underline the potential of agroforestry to sustain yields in the face of increasingly variable water availability, further substantiating the contribution of alley cropping agroforestry for farming systems’ resilience to increasingly variable weather conditions. They moreover contribute to planning and policy support for advancing agroforestry as a climate smart solution in temperate regions.

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