Climate Change Adaptation in Africa

An Historical Ecology

Gufu Oba

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138240773
• eBook ISBN: 9781317745907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

In the context of growing global concerns about climate change, this book presents a regional and sub-continental synthesis of pastoralists' responses to past environmental changes and reflects on the lessons for current and future environmental challenges.

Drawing from rock art, archaeology, paleoecological data, trade, ancient hydrological technology, vegetation, social memory and historical documentation, this book creates detailed reconstructions of past climate change adaptations across Sahelian Africa. It evaluates the present and future challenges to climate change adaptation in the region in terms of social memory, rainfall variability, environmental change and armed conflicts and examines the ways in which governance and policy drivers may undermine pastoralists' adaptive strategies. The book's scope covers the Red Sea coast, Somaliland, Somalia, the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, and northern Kenya, part of the Ethiopian highlands and Eritrea, areas where past climate change has been extreme and future change makes it vital to understand the dynamics of adaptation.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental history, human ecology, geography, climate change, environment studies, development studies, pastoralism, anthropology and African studies.

1 An historical ecological framework

Introduction

In the future, human societies across the globe are expected to experience dramatic changes to their livelihoods due to climate change that could profoundly undermine their adaptive capacities (Brooks 2010: 44). In that regard, one of the continents expected to suffer most from climate change is Africa. The suggestion is that the continent has all the ingredients of social, economic and ecological nature that makes it vulnerable (Toulmin 2009). Whereas the discussion on potential adverse impacts by climate change has been kept at generalised levels, no studies have so far incorporated both historical and contemporary issues on the impacts of the past and future climate change. We lack regional synthesis on any of the production systems that highlight such concerns from perspectives of historical ecology. The impetus for this regional synthesis is therefore the suggestion that arid and semi-arid lands of the world in general are among the ecosystems likely to suffer increases in temperature and reduced precipitation, resulting in potential adverse impacts on rural economies. The argument further foresees that pastoral and agro-pastoral systems, which are the dominant traditional land use systems in arid ecological regions, will be at greater risk of climate change than other forms of production systems. Past adaptations to shifting climates were in terms of relationships between the livelihoods and the environment, as well as reflections of various levels of survival strategies by the herders (Smith 1992: xi). Africa hosts a large concentration of pastoral herders whose past adaptations provide important benchmarks for understanding future adaptations to climate changes.

A contribution to this study is to answer the question of whether adaptations to past climate changes could improve our understanding of anticipated future changes. This is also central to Nicholas Brooks’ (2010: 44) view that,

While the mechanisms driving global climate change were very different to those operating today, an examination of human-environment interactions during the [past] period, as inferred from archaeological records interpreted within their paleoenvironmental contexts, gives us some valuable insights into how human societies respond to rapid changes in climate, landscapes and resource variability.

The past informs us how pastoral societies developed. The shift from hunting and foraging to pastoralism several millennia ago demanded fundamental changes in human strategies in relation to the changing environment and food availability. With an increase in aridity, the hunter-gatherers needed more reliable food sources, which they found by domesticating the animals they had hunted in the past. The domestication of stock allowed the development of complex societies, which were necessary for adjusting to the changing environment (Smith 1992; Marshall and Hildebrand 2002). We can envisage how small bands of nomadic communities with no central organisation may have responded to climate change in terms of their seasonal foraging. Our evidence is the rock art they left behind.

The iconography of their rock art has information about their adaptive mechanisms. They had a means of communication among members and with other communities. The livestock they domesticated and depicted in the rock art exemplify choices based on the adaptive capacities of various species, while the chronological sequences of their introduction into local habitats depict economic transformation as a mechanism of adaptation (Brandt and Carder 1987: 194). It is from this vantage point that the adaptive strategies of contemporary African pastoralists were developed. From this distant past, we can use a window of historical ecology through which future adaptations might be understood (Hamilton 1982: 3).

The work asked the following questions:

1 What were the forms of evidence used for climate changes and adaptations by the rock art and the contemporary pastoralists in Africa?

2 To what extent is pastoralist knowledge of space and time supported by local and regional adaptive strategies?

3 What were historical evidences of globalisations by ancient pastoralists and to what extent were trade networks important in non-pastoral adaptive strategies?

4 Considering that water is a major limitation to pastoralism under conditions of climate change, what were the hypotheses for the developments of ancient water systems?

5 How did African pastoralists adapt to centuries of disasters associated with droughts, famine, locust plagues and epidemics?

6 What were the past environments like and how were they transformed following epidemic disasters: what were the influences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ colonial sciences on the perceived roles of pastoralists in environmental change?

7 To what extent were the failures of colonial land use policies and mitigation impacts explained by the failure to account for rainfall variability?

8 What are the main challenges to future climate change in Africa?

Before addressing the questions we begin by defining the concepts used in this work.

Defining concepts

Climate change as a concept means different things to different people and for that reason its definition has not been clear-cut to differentiate it from changing weather. Technically the climate of any region refers to the “long-term weather conditions including seasonal changes” (Cowie 2013: 5). Climate change involves shifts from one extreme threshold to the other. The returns and frequencies in the shifts between different thresholds occur on timescales of several hundred or thousands of years. Such shifts of global scale are caused by variable environmental factors including changes in sea surface pressure and temperature changes. Thus, the ancient climate changes might be due to natural events, while after the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) of the 1990s, the future climate change is associated with emissions of greenhouse gases (or global warming) that are linked to the rapid rise in global temperature. The debate therein has sparked controversies in terms of such evidence as the hockey stick-shaped global temperature rise (Behringer 2010: 5; Cowie 2013: 44). What the current discussions are not revealing is the scale involved by natural drivers of the past in the discussions of the current global warming scenarios and if they do, what would the combined behaviour of the two be like? Climate change in terms of time and scales at least in the media tends to be confused with natural variability. Climate variability occurs when the climate of any region goes through unpredictable but short-term fluxes characterised by periods of heavy rainfall and drought or periods of heavy snow or lack of it. Climate variability taken in the short term is part of the behaviour of the long-term climate but does not depict change. It does, however, influence adaptive strategies of humans and other organisms. The differentiation is in terms of indicators needed to confirm that the climate has shifted from one extreme to another.

Environmental historians have used environmental proxies such as pollen, lake levels and flood regimes of rivers, tree rings and social memory to describe climate change. Each of the changes has been benchmarked to a threshold beyond which a change is anticipated. All these indicators require calibration and adjustments with known climate events globally to make sense if real change had occurred. In this book we have used climate change in reference to adaptations by African pastoralists. It is the behaviour of the pastoral systems in their responses to climate variability in the short term and climate change in the long term that informs us about their adaptive responses.

Thus the term “climate change adaptation” is defined in various ways (Lisa, Schipper and Burton 2009), but we will adopt a simplified form, referring to responses over lengthy periods to the dynamics of environmental conditions fluctuating from one stable form to another. Adaptation is a responsive action that individuals and communities undertake to protect their livelihoods over time. Adaptation demonstrates “building adaptive capacity, thereby increasing the ability of individuals, groups, or organisations to adjust to changes and implementing adaptation decisions” (Nelson et al. 2007: 397). This includes but is not limited to “[m]itigation strategies … [to] help prevent or minimize” the impact of climate change (Nyong, Adesina and Elasha 2007: 791).

The relationships between herds and the environment reflect levels of adaptive management that herders use to increase their survival mechanisms. Herd mobility between landscape pastures and breed selection are among adaptive strategies used to cope with changing environments (Smith 1992: xi). Adaptation might be successful if the production system is sustainable through structural and behavioural responses to long-term climate change. Accordingly, adaptations by pastoral production to climate change “are better understood as a continuum, along which individuals and groups may move through time – against the background of long-term environmental change” (Anderson and Johnson 1988: 11).

In this work, adaptations to past climates refer to more than merely responding to the physical climate and environment. Rather, adaptations involve social, political and economic drivers that influence the adaptive capacity of societies. These we described in terms of the questions posed in understanding the roles played by multiple drivers of adaptations. The drivers have not, however, been understood within the framework of “historical processes leading to modern adaptive strategies” (Smith 1992: xiii). Our approach therefore allows us to ask broad questions about the mechanisms of adaptations, using a variety of evidence that requires an extraordinary synthesis of scattered information to reconstruct the past and contemplate the future (see also Anderson and Johnson 1988: 2–3). We do so by applying an historical ecological framework.

We adopt Bruce Winterhalder’s (1994: 18) definition of “historical ecology” to understand adaptation through time. He suggests that although the concept might have a variety of meanings, it can be summed up as “a commitment to certain theoretical principles, a methodology or a form of investigation … within a framework provided by … set[s] of concepts” which dialectically have three perspectives. The first concerns the ecology of past environments and its relationship with human agents. The second perspective focuses on spatial and temporal features that allow analyses of the outcome of the interactions between human agents and the environment, based on a synthesis of knowledge drawing on anthropology, archaeology, ecology, history, geography, commerce and political science. The third is that it also draws on environmental events that shaped past human adaptive capacities. Using “region as an organic entity” (Brondizio 2006: 366) and landscapes as local environments, this approach analyses the responses of population movements and environmental variability to historical events. Researchers are thus able to sample across historical timescales. In a sense, these perspectives reveal continuities and dramatic disjunctures of the past compared to the present (Denevan 2006: 159). We rely on environmental footprints combined with social memories that illustrate trajectories of change (Crumley 1994; Baleé 2006; Egan and Howell 2001; Wagner 1996). This is what Jane Carruthers (2012: 1) describes as “nature and human histories in relation to how changes occurred over time”. Human knowledge of the environment and social memory have a direct bearing on the techniques that societies have used to manage their environment. Historical ecology is therefore concerned with “long-term changes in the physical environment and in the patterns of interconnections between the environment and humans” (Kleinschmidt 2000). These descriptions show that the concept is interdisciplinary. The historical component describes the “chronological accounts of selected events given coherence and [bounding] by reference to some theoretic position [such as testing a hypothesis]”. The ecology component refers to relations between organisms (we have used pastoralists) and their environments within the context of time, space and knowledge.

The vast sources of information and interpretations of connectivity between people and their environment, and the international connections – diversities of cultures, trade and technological transfers, as well as human movements – make such a regional study complex. There are no simple causal relationships, but rather numerous pathways that might lead from one historical period in time to others, each time opening up new avenues for adaptations to succeed. Indeed, the application of interdisciplinarity to the concept of adaptation causes additional complications, as each sub-discipline often has criteria and deductive methods not easily applicable to others. This implies that our discussions must maintain sufficient generality to allow for dialogue between different forms of evidence in order to find explanations for particular adaptations. We use an example here.

The use of archaeology as a technique of historical ecology generates “inferences about a deep time that existed beyond human memory and before the advent of written documents” (Stahl 2006: 127). It works to test historical ideas that combine past historical narratives with present-day observations. Ancient rock art and settlement patterns depict social, cultural, economic and political changes experienced by past population...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Advances in Climate Change Research
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of plates
• List of figures
• Preface
• 1 An historical ecological framework: introduction
• 2 Rock art pastoralists: historical ecology of adaptations
• 3 Pastoralism, space, time and knowledge: social and ecological perspectives
• 4 Coastal commerce - interior caravan trade: pastoralists' participation ca. AD 600-1900
• 5 Origin of ancient well technology: historical hypotheses
• 6 Droughts, famine, locusts and epidemics: centuries of adaptations
• 7 The nineteenth- and twentieth-century environmental changes: European journal narratives
• 8 Adaptive responses to climate variability, grazing and water scarcities, ca. 1908-1962: a case study
• 9 Challenges to future climate change adaptations: some propositions
• 10 Conclusion
• Index