Differential Adaptation Strategies to Climate Change in African Cropland by Agro-Ecological Zones

This paper quantifies how African
farmers have adapted their crop and irrigation decisions to
their farm's current agro-ecological zone. The results
indicate that farmers carefully consider the climate and
other conditions of their farm when making these choices.
These results are then used to forecast how farmers might
change their irrigation and crop choice decisions if climate
changes. The model predicts African farmers would adopt
irrigation more often under a very hot and dry climate
scenario but less often with a mild and wet scenario.
However, farms in the deserts, lowland humid forest, or mid
elevation humid forest would reduce irrigation even in the
very hot and dry climate scenario. Area under fruits and
vegetables would increase Africa-wide with the very hot and
dry climate scenario, except in the lowland semi-arid
agro-ecological zone. Millet would increase overall under
the mild and wet scenario, but decline substantially in the
lowland dry savannah and lowland semi-arid agro-ecological
zones. Maize would be chosen less often across all the
agro-ecological zones under both climate scenarios. Wheat
would decrease across Africa. The authors recommend that
care must be taken to match adaptations to local conditions
because the optimal adaptation would depend on the
agro-ecological zone and the climate scenario.