Adapting to climate change |
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A changing climate means an unchanging commitment to ecological land use management
Climate change is damaging and destroying our farmers’ crops. Rising temperatures and more extreme weather is resulting in pest outbreaks, degraded soils and lower crop yields. Climate change is making our farmers hungrier, sicker and less financially secure.
So they’re fighting back:
- Planting trees to reduce erosion and control run-off
- Moving to fields less vulnerable to flood and erosion
- Finding better crop varieties or new crops entirely
- Creating good drainage systems
- Using more sustainable methods to control pests and weeds
- Supplementing their farming income
And PELUM is helping them with all these actions, through education, training, awareness-raising and lobbying.
Recent work to help increase people’s understanding of climate change
We recently produced a factsheet containing some climate change adaptation suggestions for small-scale farmers. We also produced a video. Two clips from the video are on our YouTube Channel.
At the country levels, PELUM is working to help people better understand our changing climate and what they can do about it. For example:
- PELUM Zambia’s coordinator, Richard Chintu, presented a paper at the RAEIN-AFRICA climate change meeting held in South Africa. The paper is soon to be published and the abstract is available now. RAEIN-Africa is one of our partners. In addition, PELUM Zambia has been running a big campaign to help people understand what climate change is and how farmers can adapt to it, including by producing a television documentary and running a two-hour phone-in radio programme. PELUM has also produced a fact sheet that outlines basic information on climate change for policymakers and farmers
- PELUM Malawi developed a policy brief on Climate Change which it is using in advocacy and lobbying
- PELUM Uganda helped its member organisations better understand how they could support farmers, at a climate change workshop it organised
- PELUM Zimbabwe is revising the PELUM College syllabus to take greater account of climate change
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