West African farmers 'already adapting to climate change'

Christophe Assogba in SciDev.net: African farmers have developed new cultivation techniques and adopted short-season crop varieties using their own experience and observation to adapt to climate change a workshop in Benin has heard.

"Social adaptation to climate change has also been found in animals," said Abdoulaye Gouro, president of the scientific committee of the research network RIPIECSA (Interdisciplinary and Participatory Research on Interactions between Climate, Ecosystems and Society in West Africa). He was speaking at a workshop last week (18–21 October) organised by France's Institute for Development Research (IRD) to obtain feedback on current RIPIESCA projects.

"Farmers are not inactive in the face of climate change. They are sowing second crops, and growing cassava, yams and so on in the lowlands. They have been able to increase their acreage in some areas because of the shifting seasons," Euloge Agbossou, head of the hydrology laboratory at the University of Abomey-Calavi, Benin,told the workshop.

"People are not waiting for engineers, scientists and researchers in order to adapt to climate change. They are aware of the phenomenon, they feel it around them and they have adapted to it," he said....

A cotton field in Northern Benin, shot by Marco Schmidt, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license