Climate change, population growth and social conflict have left many farmers and pastoralists in sub-Saharan Africa at near constant crisis conditions. Participatory climate resilience assessments can help farmer and pastoralist communities to identify, measure and prioritize actions to improve the climate resilience of their agricultural systems. Self-evaluation and Holistic Assessment of climate change Resilience of farmers and Pastoralists (SHARP) has been developed as a dual-purpose tool, employing participatory methods to help farmers and pastoralists to discuss and understand threats and opportunities, and to prioritize individual and collective actions aimed at improving overall resilience. Additionally, SHARP provides government and programme management with qualitative and quantitative information on a wide variety of important economic and development factors. The development of SHARP faces many challenges inherent to assessing resilience in terms of the complex nature and wide-reaching impacts of climate change. SHARP presents a unique assessment that combines resilience literature and indicators with a participatory self-assessment from the farmers and pastoralists.
Choptiany, JMH; Phillips, S; Graeub, BE; Colozza, D; Settle, W; Herren, B; Batello, C
SHARP: integrating a traditional survey with participatory self-evaluation and learning for climate change resilience assessment
Climate And Development