Case-study by Katya Kuang-Idba (African Development Bank), Vinda Kisyombe (African Development Bank), and Saliha Dobardzic (Global Environment Facility) for “Time to Adapt: Insights from the GEF’s Experience in Adaptation to Climate Change” .
Malawi, a country of 16.7 million people, ranks as one of the poorest in the world. With an annual per-capita gross domestic product of US$857, it is estimated that nearly one-third of the population lives in extreme poverty. Agriculture accounts for 37% of the gross domestic product, and employs roughly 80% of the labor force. The most important cash crop is tobacco, produced primarily for export, while maize is the most important food security crop. The country’s prospects for economic development are hindered by poor infrastructure and services in the transportation, health, and education sectors.
The Climate Adaptation for Rural Livelihoods and Agriculture (CARLA) project was the first project to work on climate change adaptation in Malawi’s agricultural sector. The project was implemented in the Karonga, Dedza, and Chikwawa districts, identified in Malawi’s NAPA as highly vulnerable to climate change.
To help rural agriculture communities adapt to changes in precipitation and temperature, CARLA financed projects to implement adaptation measures at the community level, and enhanced the adaptive capacity of the national government on community-based adaptation to provide lasting support for community-level work. The project’s adaptation activities were designed to complement a broader set of development interventions associated with rural poverty reduction.
Project Background and Brief History
Climate change and farming in Malawi
The weather in Malawi is erratic, with frequent droughts. Even in years of adequate rainfall, periods of dry weather can interrupt plant growth and greatly reduce agricultural productivity. Poor land management, including clear-cutting of nutrient-rich native species, further undermines crop productivity. These factors are major contributors to the current vulnerability of smallholder farmers.
More than 90% of the people of Malawi engage in subsistence, rain-fed agriculture. About 60% of the population lacks access to sufficient food on a year-round basis. Female- and children-headed households are among the most vulnerable. These problems are compounded by rapid environmental degradation as a result of agricultural expansion to marginal lands and deforestation, inadequate knowledge and skills in the productive use and management of land and natural resources, inadequate access to land and credit, poor health services, and gender inequalities. Extreme weather events due to climate variability, and low capacity to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change, exacerbate these problems.
Current climate extremes are already pushing people further into poverty; economically marginalized populations are and will continue to be the most vulnerable to the effects of climate disruptions.
Climate change in Malawi is expected to exacerbate weather extremes, including higher temperatures, more variable weather patterns, more intense storms, and shorter growing seasons with less rainfall in many locations. These climate changes can strain agriculture and livestock, damage infrastructure and housing, disrupt livelihoods, and — when severe enough — displace vast numbers of people. In Malawi, new approaches to agricultural production are required to ensure and improve productivity in the face of climate change.
Successful farming under increasing climate variability requires the adaptation of farming systems.
The CARLA project
To help rural communities adapt to climate change, CARLA (Climate Adaptation for Rural Livelihoods and Agriculture) financed projects that implemented adaptation measures at the community level in order to enhance the resilience of those communities to climate change, and enhanced the adaptive capacity of the national government on community-based adaptation to provide lasting support for the community-level work. These projects improved agriculture, land conservation, and land management that benefited the livelihoods of people in rural communities and created more resilient farming practices.
Specific measures included enhanced afforestation, fish farming, livestock rearing, conservation agriculture, drought-tolerant crop introduction, fruit tree propagation, water distribution, irrigation efficiency, groundwater capture, water recycling, and water system rehabilitation. These adaptation activities were also designed to help achieve broader development objectives associated with rural poverty reduction, which were pursued through an existing African Development Bank effort, the Smallholder Crop Production and Marketing Project (SCPMP).1 By developing an enabling environment for adaptation, CARLA aimed to foster replication of these interventions beyond its direct project activities.
Building on previous efforts and coordinating with NAPA priorities
CARLA complemented the SCPMP, which promoted the use of improved irrigation technologies and practices to increase the agricultural productivity of small-scale farmers in Malawi. The aim of SCPMP was to reduce poverty, improve food security, and reduce vulnerability to climate change.
Both the SCPMP and CARLA aimed to address the first two priorities identified in Malawi’s 2006 NAPA: (1) improving community resilience to climate change through the development of sustainable rural livelihoods; and (2) improving Malawi’s preparedness to cope with droughts and floods. CARLA financed climate change activities that were not addressed by SCPMP, including both long- and short-term strategies to build resilience to climate extremes, improvements to agricultural production, and betterment of rural livelihoods.
The NAPA also identified six districts as adaptation priorities in Malawi and the CARLA project conducted adaptation activities in three of these districts: Karonga District, in the north; Dedza District, in the central portion of the country; and Chikwawa District, in the south. Best practices from these three model districts have been disseminated to additional communities and to the three remaining high-priority districts.
Project financing and partnerships
A GEF LDCF grant of US$3 million supported the project. Partners leveraged an additional US$6.5 million in co-financing. Project partners included the African Development Bank, which implemented the SCPMP and the CARLA project; and the Malawi Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development, which served as the project’s Executing Agency. The Ministry’s Department of Irrigation was responsible for project implementation and monitoring. A team of technical staff carried out the day-to-day coordination and monitoring of project activities. The project targeted communities who, prior to the project, were engaged in maize cultivation.
Project Achievements
The CARLA project emphasized the implementation of adaptation measures in model villages. The community selected each measure based on local conditions, in accordance with adaptation measures identified in the NAPA. These measures helped beneficiary communities and supported climate change adaptation by:
· Helping communities and community members use resources in a sustainable manner, which conserved scarce resources and improved ecosystem resiliency to climate variability.
· Diversifying livelihoods to help community members gain alternate sources of income in order to improve their resilience to future changes.
· Increasing production and productivity of crops, fish, and livestock; and reducing post-harvest loss, which puts farmers in a better position to absorb seasonal crop loss.
The project has seen the strongest progress in four adaptation areas: livestock rearing, fish farming, fruit tree propagation, and irrigation enhancement.
Livestock rearing. The communities involved in the CARLA project hailed the success of the small stock livestock program. The program used a “pass-on” system, where livestock offspring were passed onto subsequent beneficiaries. Goats were the primary livestock species; they are well-adapted to the area and can survive extended periods of dry weather. They are easy to manage with appropriate training or supervision.
Because of the pass-on system, the program had a wider impact than other adaptation activities. By 2014, the first set of beneficiaries received 989 goats. The goat pass-on program exemplified an additional-livelihood activity that can provide a safety net for the household, should climate changes jeopardize other sources of income.
Fish farming. In Kafulama in the Dedza District, farmers have had some success with newly developed fish ponds and have begun harvesting fish from them. The project also constructed fish ponds in the Karonga and Chikwawa districts, but the outcomes of the ponds are not yet clear in those districts.
Project personnel have introduced fish farming as part of an integrated farming system that diversifies sources of household income. However, during the course of the project, it became apparent that climate change may increase risks associated with this particular development intervention (such as potentially spreading invasive aquatic species during increasingly frequent and intense catastrophic flood events, or altering the local dynamics of malaria in an adverse way).
Fruit tree propagation. The project’s fruit tree propagation activities have had greater success than expected. By 2014, 615 farmers had received training on fruit tree propagation methods and practices, together with a number of different types of trees, including banana, paw paw, orange, and mango trees. In Karonga, bananas were most successful in terms of local adoption and fruit production. In Chikwawa, mango tree production was most successfully taken up by farmers. In Dedza, lemon and mango trees were most readily taken up by farmers and have successfully produced fruit.
There has also been a growing demand from neighboring communities to take part in fruit-tree activities related to the project. The fruit-tree program is an example of an additional livelihood activity that has the potential to improve households’ resiliency to climate change by diversifying their food and income sources. Additionally, fruit trees can help minimize flood potential by reducing runoff during rain events.
Irrigation enhancement. Typical Malawi irrigation relies on hand-watering with watering cans and buckets. Enhanced irrigation has the potential to help communities access, manage, and convey scarce water resources and therefore help to conserve water resources in times of drought. Several villages in the three districts piloted the use of a treadle pump irrigation system and solar pumping technology. In Karonga and Chikwawa, pumps moved water from shallow wells that were constructed by local farmers with financial support provided by the CARLA project. In Karonga, farmers also used treadle pumps to refill fish ponds from groundwater wells and a nearby lagoon. Treadle pumps increased the size of irrigated areas. Through CARLA’s irrigation activities, agricultural productivity increased on average from 1 ton per hectare to 3.5 tons per hectare. This increase improved food stability by helping generate a surplus from irrigated crops. Because irrigation activities increase production and incomes, community members will be better positioned to absorb potential climate-related crop losses.
Co-benefits of the CARLA project. The CARLA project generated several co-benefits. For example, the creation of six boreholes addressed water-supply shortages that affected fruit tree nurseries and also improved villagers’ access to clean drinking water. Other examples were farmers’ new understanding of climate change concepts, their ability to share their knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships, and their successful identification of adaptation measures suitable for their areas. The farmers were able to articulate both short- and long-term strategies for addressing the challenges of climate change; this was a measure of the project’s ongoing sustainability, as peer-to-peer learning is important venue in bringing about behavior change in this particular context.
Project Challenges
Extreme weather event. In January 2015, Malawi experienced some of the most devastating floods in its history. The pilot sites of the CARLA project were not immune to this disaster. Of the three project districts, Chikwawa was the most severely affected. Nearly 100% of crops were washed away in 6 villages, with 11 more reporting 50% crop losses. The project team mobilized quickly to respond to this event, distributing additional planting materials to affected households.
Institutional issues. The CARLA project was bundled with SCPMP and assigned to the same oversight entity, the Ministry of Irrigation. However, while this arrangement appeared beneficial, the project had to first overcome another challenge, that of the lack of capacity at the Ministry of Irrigation. The Ministry of Irrigation had to overcome the challenges of handling an agricultural climate change adaptation project with little climate change experience. In an attempt to build capacity within the relevant government departments, CARLA facilitated training workshops on climate change adaptation and the Model Village Approach to increase awareness of the project. The training sessions emphasized the link between climate vulnerability and livelihoods, and how CARLA would allow local communities to adapt to a changing climate. The project also engaged agricultural experts on the ground.
Dependency on the program. Local communities made progress in their understanding of climate change, and how they could adapt to it. Many members of the project communities grasped the concept of climate change and its negative effects, and villagers showed strong momentum to increase their efforts to adapt. However, the project team observed that beneficiaries began to expect help, which could pose a serious challenge. The original idea of training beneficiaries was that they could learn to do things on their own. Instead, project beneficiaries began relying on the project support and seemed to expect continued support. The project attempted to overcome this dependency challenge by promoting partnerships with nongovernmental organizations and foundations that could ensure the sustainable use of finances and continued training. During the 2014–2015 production season, the project emphasized building the capacity of beneficiaries to do things on their own. For example, project personnel procured and issued most seedlings for afforestation, agroforestry, and fruit production to farmers during the 2012–2013 and 2013–2014 seasons; however, community members themselves produced the majority of the seedlings during the 2014–2015 season.
Sustainability of funding. The sustainability of funding for the project also became a concern. The revolving fund for livestock medication kits did not grow as expected. This was largely due, first, to a lack of understanding by some government officials. These officials thought that the project would continue providing resources and support to farmers even after the project ended.
To correct this problem, the concept of sustainability was highlighted in relevant trainings and interactions with the community. Farmers and implementing staff began to understand what sustainability means in the context of project funding. The second contributing factor in the slow growth of the revolving funds was that the service fees were too low, particularly taking into consideration the increasing cost of veterinary drugs. Subsequently, project personnel encouraged farmers to establish more sustainable fee structures, without the expectation of cash injections in the future. The same principle also applied to establishing revolving funds for irrigation. The project continues to place a heavy emphasis on sustainability mechanisms for all interventions.
Adaptation activity challenges. Some of the adaptation activities have experienced setbacks, including:
· Crop planting and afforestation have suffered from financial mismanagement.
· Livestock rearing in the Dedza and Chikwawa districts saw mortality rates of roughly 8%. This is because the project prematurely sold and delivered goats to unprepared or untrained caretakers.
· Fish pond productivity has remained fairly low in all locations — 75 kilograms for each 200 square meters of pond — because of poor-quality feed, low availability of water during the dry season, theft, and predators.
Analysis
Institutional arrangements are of utmost importance. The executing agency matters; the CARLA project suffered because it was directly overseen by an institution that lacked agricultural and climate change knowledge and capacity. This could have been mitigated if there had been closer coordination between agencies with proper subject matter expertise in both climate change adaptation and agriculture. Close coordination between teams is essential to ensure proper and timely implementation of a multi-disciplinary project.
PIU designation is key. In a similar vein, the entity overseeing project management needs to have the appropriate knowledge and skills to issue and account for project funds. During the CARLA project, an independent PIU was much more effective than its government counterpart. The government-based PIU did not have sufficient skills or human resources to disburse funding in a timely manner. From this experience, the importance of having the right administrative arrangements in place emerged clearly.
Ensure sustainability. It is important to share substantial responsibilities in implementing project activities with the beneficiary communities. Development assistance is limited and it is a significant challenge to overcome the perception of ongoing project support. However, sustained improvement to the community’s socioeconomic well-being and resilience to climate stressors is at stake. CARLA serves as an example of the time needed to establish adequate community structures for project sustainability. Furthermore, sharing current understanding about climate vulnerabilities and climate change impacts is needed for a successful outcome; it will take time and can be challenging. To prevent dependency, projects should emphasize that support is temporary, even if the challenges may increase in severity. Projects should therefore stimulate beneficiaries to internalize new skills and training to become autonomous. Training programs should be innovative, interactive, and constructed in a way that encourages autonomy and pro-active agency, which, at least in this case, appears to be at the core of achieving successful and sustainable adaptation. However, CARLA’s three-year implementation period may not be adequate for ensuring the long-term adoption of adaptation practices by the community.
Use integrated strategies. Project personnel should not implement even successful activities as standalone initiatives. Integration among activities maximizes adaptation benefits. For example, integrated fish farming strategies should also include activities related to irrigation and seed multiplication. This also serves as a hedge against risk, whereby there is a greater chance of securing some income even under generally unfavorable climatic conditions. More thought needs to go into which portfolio of activities, at individual and community levels, optimizes risks and rewards.
Broaden the dialogue across sectors. As a mitigating measure, mainstreaming climate adaptation and instituting a broader dialogue across sectors can potentially safeguard against risks that come with implementing project measures that may have been a relatively low-level risk historically, but that may increase with climate change. As with any development project, there are safeguards that need to be considered. However, the safeguards, and how they apply to any intervention, need to be considered in light of a changing climate. For example, in the case of establishing fish ponds, more thought needs to go into what fish species are appropriate for farming given the risk of extreme flooding (e.g., this may necessitate the involvement of biosafety expertise in project supervision and course correction), or how the fish ponds, in combination with more frequently occurring extreme weather, will alter the malaria dynamic in the communities (e.g., this may benefit from the involvement of public health expertise).
Aim for robust implementation. Much of practical adaptation has focused on the design of intervention, whereby the effort is to select the scope, target area, choice of technology or technique, and specifications of the intervention (e.g., “how tall the wall should be”) based on current and future climate change, and not the historical record, as has been the usual practice. However, given that some manifestations of extreme weather, consistent with climate change, are occurring more frequently, it is time to consider how to conduct implementation in a way that “immunizes” it from any adverse climate change. In the future, more consideration should be given to the risk of extreme weather events when designing such interventions in Malawi.
Time is of the essence. The window of opportunity is narrow, and the high cost of delays and inaction while the frequency of catastrophic events increases is perhaps best exemplified by the river bank afforestation effort. The trees planted along river banks can provide some physical defenses against floods. The effectiveness of this defense will depend on the severity or the force of the flood, and the strength of the buffer. If the next flood occurs before the trees will have had a chance to become established, further erosion and damage are the likely outcomes (in addition to wasted funds and effort), and this intervention will not count as a success.
Next Steps
As of 2015, the CARLA project is ongoing. Immediate next steps were focused on activities that could be started, and potentially completed, before the initial project implementation period ends in December 2015 (African Development Bank Group, 2011). Longer implementation timeline. Challenges with the PIU, staff turnover, and other issues delayed implementation progress. As a result, the Malawi government recognized that climate change practices have not been fully adopted and additional time might be needed to reach CARLA’s goals. Therefore, it was recommended to extend the project end date by one year to allow adequate time to disseminate best practices to the wider community.
Shift to solar-powered water pumps. The government requested the use of solar energy for small-scale irrigation schemes instead of diesel pumps. Diesel pumps traditionally have higher capital and operating costs than solar pumps. Additionally, solar pumps emit less carbon dioxide, producing a climate change mitigation advantage over diesel. Unfortunately, the procurement of solar pumps was slow because of higherthan-expected costs. The project team considered other configurations and options to overcome this issue.
Sustainable financing mechanisms. To overcome the financial and institutional challenges experienced thus far, the government could encourage mechanisms to ensure the sustainability of investments. This could include establishing revolving funds and civic education activities to support communities in establishing foundations that generate ongoing benefits.
Linkages to related efforts. Efforts by a number of agencies clearly link to and build on CARLA’s work:
· The World Bank is spearheading a project in the Shire River Basin to develop a planning framework to improve land and water management, and to pilot activities that will help people use wetlands more sustainably.
· UNDP is working on three projects aimed at a variety of climate change adaptation measures in Malawi. The first seeks to reduce the vulnerability of rural and urban populations living in the Machinga and Mangochi districts through a combination of ecological, physical, and policy measures. The second project is working to strengthen the climate monitoring capabilities of Malawi, integrate this information into development plans, and use it to develop early-warning systems. The third project focuses on a decentralized approach to adaptation that will help to empower communities to take ownership of adaptation measures, building upon previous adaptation projects.
· FAO is working on climate change adaptation in the fishery sector. It is integrating climate change adaptation by conducting vulnerability assessments for Lake Malawi and Lake Malombe to explore future risks in the fishery sector.
Conclusion
Observed outcomes and testimonies of beneficiaries show that the CARLA project had some early success, with the potential to reduce the vulnerability of the people of Malawi to climate change. The participating communities began to adapt to climate change through the every-day integration of new livelihood activities. For example, many farmers that never owned livestock before this project now have three or more animals. Others were able to increase agricultural productivity as a result of irrigation activities and, hence, some were able to harvest twice in one season. Afforestation activities had similar success. Overall, households are now more aware of climate change, its impacts, and potential strategies to cope, such as by engaging in more than one livelihood activity.
Flooding in early 2015 presented an immediate challenge for Malawi going forward. In these floods, 276 people were killed (Guha-Sapir et al.), and approximately 200,000 were displaced (The Guardian, 2015). Entire villages were washed away. As a result, half of the country was declared a disaster zone. The devastating damages to infrastructure and agricultural lands guarantee a slow recovery and potential economic disaster.
The experience of these floods demonstrates a reality that no project can make a community completely immune to all extreme events. However, adaptation projects can help to reduce a disaster’s impacts and shorten the recovery time by improving communities’ adaptive capacity though education and experience. They can help increase a community’s overall resilience by helping the community rebound more quickly and better plan for the future following a disaster.
Torrential rains like those that caused the flooding are likely to increase in frequency and intensity as a result of climate change. This underscores the urgent need for adaptation across all sectors of the government, environment, and economy in Malawi. The GEF, along with its partner institutions, is working to address this need, with total project investments of over US$114 million.
Although the presence of CARLA and other projects is a positive development, securing the livelihoods of the people of Malawi in the face of climate change is an all-encompassing endeavor. It will require sustained action on the part of the Malawian government to incorporate climate risks into development planning. It will also require action on the part of the beneficiaries of these international aid projects, and their communities, to continue to implement measures deemed as effective methods of adaptation.
The case-study is part of the book “Time to Adapt: Insights from the GEF’s Experience in Adaptation to Climate Change” — a joint effort by the GEF partnership to showcase some of the insights gained from the now substantial portfolio of GEF-funded adaptation projects.
The GEF has invested over $1.3 billion to help communities in the developing world adapt to climate change, notably through the Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) and the Special Climate Change Fund (SCCF).
