Does receiving information on potential adverse weather conditions induce adaptive responsesby smallholders? Do market institutions ease constraints to adaptation of these practices? Thisreport examines these questions using a unique panel dataset of Zambian smallholderhouseholds collected before and after 2015/16 El Niño Southern Oscillation event. The analysisfinds that farmers receiving drought-related seasonal forecasts are more likely to integratedrought tolerant crops into their cropping systems and to acquire improved maize seedvarieties. These farmers, on average, are found to apply double the quantity [...]

This paper examines the impacts of the El Niño during the 2015/2016 season on maize productivity and income in rural Zambia. The analysis aims at identifying whether and how sustainable land management (SLM) practices and livelihood diversification strategies have contributed to moderate the impacts of such a weather shock. The analysis was conducted using a specifically designed survey called the El Niño Impact Assessment Survey (ENIAS), which is combined with the 2015 wave of the Rural Agricultural Livelihoods Surveys (RALS), [...]

This study seeks to expand our understanding of the implications of weather shocks on thewelfare of livestock owning households in Kyrgyzstan and to identify policy options that canenhance the resilience of these vulnerable households. More specifically, the study has threeobjectives. First, it examines the short (one year) and medium-term (four years) impacts of theharsh winter on the welfare of livestock owning household (measured in terms of foodconsumption expenditure) using a unique, multi-year panel data set. Measuring the impact attwo points [...]

This paper explores the resilience capacity of rural Ethiopian households after the drought shock occurred in 2011. The work develops an original empirical framework able to capture the policy and socio-economic determinants of households’ resilience capacity by making parametric statistical assumption on the resilience distribution. To this end, the analysis employs a two-wave representative panel dataset aligned with detailed weather records while controlling for a large set of household- and community-level characteristics. The analysis shows that the majority of these [...]

Crop diversification is an important policy objective to promote climate change adaptation, yet the drivers and impacts of crop diversification vary considerably depending on the specific combinations of crops a farmer grows. This paper examines adoption determinants of seven different cropping systems in Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique, and the impact of their adoption on maize productivity and income volatility – using a multinomial endogenous treatment effect model. These cropping systems consist in different combinations of four categories of crops: dominate [...]

Households living in rural areas of developing countries rely on rain-fed agriculture for their livelihoods and, as such, are highly dependent on climatic conditions. This paper aims at presenting empirical evidence from Zambia to better understand the linkages between climatic shocks, livelihood diversification and welfare outcomes with the goal of highlighting potential policy entry points to incentivize the types of diversification aimed at improving food security and resilience to climate shocks

The goal of this study is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the impact of weather risk on rural households' welfare in Tanzania using nationally representative household panel data together with a set of novel weather variation indicators based on interpolated gridded and re-analysis weather data that capture the peculiar features of short term and long term variations in rainfall and temperature.

Climate change alters the agriculture production conditions and food security of developing countries, increasing the frequency and depth of risk to agricultural production and incomes. Policy-makers need assistance in identifying risk management options in the agricultural sector that allow them to effectively respond to the climate risks they face, while maintaining and enhancing agricultural policy objectives. Climate-smart agricultural (CSA) approach was developed to provide this assistance and this brief highlights some of the key findings related to risk management from [...]

This paper evaluates the effects of weather/climate shocks on various measures of household welfare using a nationally representative panel data from Uganda National Panel Survey (UNPS) together with a set of novel climate variation indicators.

  This paper contributes to evidence base to support policies for climate smart agriculture and underlines the importance of integrating site-specific analyses of climatic variables in policy targeting to foster adoption of appropriate practices to improve food security under climate change.