Climate change adaptation practices in two rural communities in Ghana

The forested areas in the Eastern Region of Ghana hold vast potential to enhance agricultural productivity in respect of food security. The area also has the capacity to help supply the food needs for the whole country. However, with prevailing climate change mitigation and adaptation practices in some rural communities in Ghana with widespread degraded and heavily leached acidic soils, climate change increasingly brings about unpredictable weather patterns, resulting in droughts in some places and flooding in others. When these events happen, resource poor farmers with low incomes and small land holdings, who are thus ill-equipped to accommodate the climate-related problems, suffer. This chapter describes the findings derived from the work of a team of researchers and development workers in the Eastern Region of Ghana, who have researched the extent to which capacity building may help to foster resilience and climate change adaptation. The team provided training in climate change adaptation strategies to resource poor farmers and measured the effects on the resulting crop yields of the participating farmers. Researchers established experimental plots where farmers learned through practical experiential learning. The results revealed that farmers adopted several of the strategies that they encountered in the process, including altering planting dates, intercropping trees with food crops, mixed cropping, and the use of ridges and mounds in order to protect their crops and to try to increase the yields. Participating farmers (60%) increased their yields from about 26% to 40% of farm production. Other farmers (19%) increased their yields over 40% above the baseline where those methods were not used extensively. Some of the demands from farmers to facilitate widespread adoption of climate change adaptation strategies are described below.