Insight
NIRAS UK maintains a strong relationship with the University of Edinburgh and provides postgraduate students with opportunities to utilise data from our projects, or conduct their own field-based research, as part of their MSc dissertations each year.
Bantu Mabaso
The vulnerability of smallholder farmers to climate change is expected to increase as global temperatures escalate. Building farmers’ capacity for climate resilience will become increasingly important as close to 30% of global food production depends on smallholder farmers being able to maintain their livelihoods.
My MSc Dissertation project conducted in collaboration with NIRAS titled “Assessing and Building Climate Resilience in Smallholder Farm Systems” explored how climate resilience can be measured effectively in smallholder farms to understand the following:
The dissertation adds value to the literature exploring the monitoring and evaluation of programs in the context of climate change and agricultural development.
Find Bantu's Farm Resilience Assessment Scorecard and scoring guidance here.
Find Bantu's MSc Environmental Sustainability Dissertation here. Please bear in mind that the ideas in the dissertation are not yet fully refined. If you wish to reach Bantu to gain more insights or discuss further research, contact the NIRAS employee in the link.
As part of my dissertation, I developed a Farm Assessment Resilience Scorecard that can be used by practitioners as well as farmers to quantify climate resilience in smallholder farms.
The Scorecard offers the following benefits:
Implications for strengthening climate resilience for smallholders
The Farm Resilience Assessment Scorecard can be important in helping development practitioners understand how farm systems cope with climate variability over time. Once we can understand how a farm is coping upon assessing it, we can also be able to identify areas where we can intervene to create the most impact and design our resilience strengthening programs accordingly.
In addition, it is very important for farmers to be able to understand and measure climate impact in their communities. Having access to this knowledge will enable them to advocate for support and is a crucial component in achieving climate justice. An exciting potential innovation would be to create a mobile app version of the scorecard which could be used by farmers to collect data on their farms and report it back to the government. This information could then be used to inform policies and programs to strengthen resilience in response to the data collected.
