The Climate Change Project

The Seeds of Survival program promotes the in situ conservation of agricultural biodiversity to promote sustainable livelihoods in the global South. Supported by USC Canada, a Canadian social justice and environmental NGO, SoS partner organizations promote ecological agricultural practices around the world which enhance community resilience. The climate change adaptation community has traditionally focused on reducing the risk of climate impacts – through building dykes or building early warning systems for storms. However, the felt impacts of climate change are already hitting the remote communities participating in the Seeds of Survival program, and the agricultural diversity, social structures, and diversity of knowledge they have safeguarded are their most precious assets. Environmental programs that build on communities’ existing, resilient farming and social systems are more likely to enhance their capacity to adapt to climate change. For example, in Honduras, FIPAH (Foundation for Participatory Research with Honduran Farmers) is supporting community-based agricultural research teams (called CIALs) that are carrying out participatory plant breeding (PPB) activities that are generating new crop varieties that meet new climatic and social needs. Since one prediction is that the pace of change in temperature and precipitation trends is likely to bypass historic rates of change, it will be crucial that rural communities have the tools in their own hands to develop the seeds that fit new conditions. The CIALs are diversifying plant genetic resources and developing hardier plant varieties that grow well on their soils, and represent the sort of social structure that is needed to enhance agricultural biodiversity- climate adaptation synergies in the future. (FIPAH is also part of the Participatory Plant Breeding Program in Mesoamerica (PPB-MA) network) The links between participatory plant breeding and climate adaptation should not be neglected. In the northern Douentza region of Mali, on the other hand, farmers are using a variety of methods to respond to 0.9 degree Celsius increase in average temperatures; declines in rainfall; and increased variance in rainfall patterns. These include, as in the Burkina case mentioned earlier in this discussion, dry seeding to take advantage of any rainfall; investment in a number of different plots of land facing distinct climatic soil conditions, to diversify risk; planting a diversity of different varieties in a given field; picking wild food; and investing in assets like animals which can be sold if the crop fails. These strategies are developed by farmers using traditional coping techniques, experimentation, and sharing of expertise between youth and more experienced farmers. Community seed banks, seed fairs, and school arboreteums, all facilitated by USC Canada-West Africa, provides forums for adaptation strategizing. Exchanges between farmers in Douentza and Soum, Burkina Faso, has also led to new techniques in both areas. In Soum, Burkina Faso, one farmer answered the following when asked what climate change meant to him: “The seasons change, we don’t know when it will rain nor when we should plant our seeds as our grandparents used to know how to do. There are droughts everywhere, and here there are floods now that take our land, our crops, our houses and our animals. Everything has become confused and we don’t know anymore what to plant. Our seeds are being replaced by other seeds that we don’t know. There are famines and sicknesses because there are small harvests”. Farmers are adapting a number of different strategies to cope with drought and the unpredictability of the weather. To fight against land degradation many techniques have been used, notably the construction of trenches with stones, the construction of half-moons in the soil to retain water, the Zai technique with organic fertilizers, and agroforestry. The management of seeds has become one of the priorities of farmers. Communities fight regularly for the survival of their local seeds that are the best known and that respond the best to their needs and their environment. They make all sorts of organizations with a view to maintaining their genetic heritage and selections in the field to obtain the varieties that are the best adapted to this new context. This wish for sovereignty over their seeds is translated into a community seed bank that secures the local seeds and permits exchange of local seeds between farmers in the same agro climatic zone. Certain techniques and ancestral knowledge to know the weather – including the migration of birds, the appearance of flowers, insects or animals – which are the indications of the seasons, are once again a centre of interest and used by many farmers. APN-Sahel, a environmental organization based in Djibo, Burkina, is encouraging the in situ conservation of valuable biodiversity, through promotion and development of the community system of conservation, management and use of local seeds through gene and seed banks managed by farmers. According to them, it is essential to prevent the spread of GMOs and to instead promote farmers’ rights and biodiversity to help rural communities adapt to climate change. And in the Himalayas, communities in Humla, Nepal are investing in the reinforcement of terraces through planting of a variety of local shrub and bush species to prevent landslides and erosion. This is essential given increased glacial melting and river overflow, and fluctuations in rainfall, since flooding on the steep mountainsides can be devastating for crops and livelihoods. In summary, the lesson from the Seeds of Survival network is that the issue isn’t just reducing risk of climate disasters, or even engineering one local technique to help one community cope with one climatic event. Agrobiodiversity has to be held by the farmers alongside the knowledge that gives it meaning and makes it useful to the people who are being hit the hardest and earliest by a problem caused by the north. The lesson is that resilient rural communities that are creative and use their rich agricultural biodiversity and knowledge have the tools in hand to help them cope with what nature might deliver.