Simulating agricultural land-use adaptation decisions to climate change: An empirical agent-based modelling in northern Ghana

In West Africa, the majority of regional climate projections for the region predict that the study area will become warmer and that precipitation patterns will be more erratic. The aim of this article is to examine local agricultural adaptation to climate change and variability in a semi-arid area of the Upper East Region of Ghana. This is performed by integrating the two-step decision making sub-models, Perception-of-Climate-Change and Adaptation-Choice-Strategies, to the Land Use Dynamic Simulator (LUDAS). The simulation results suggest that the land-use choices in the study area reflect a tendency towards increasing subsistence farming in an area where there has been a gradual trend away from traditional land uses such as cereal production to the cultivation of groundnut, rice, maize and soybean. Groundnut monoculture production has emerged locally as coping measure for dealing with increased climatic variability. In terms of livelihood strategy, there is an increasing contribution of rice and groundnut to household gross incomes. The predicted pattern of changes in gross household income under a scenario in which climate change is perceived by local farmers explicitly revealed the contribution of adaptation options to household livelihood strategy.