Climate change will bring with it increased frequency of two types of natural disasters that affect agriculture and rural households: droughts and floods. It will also alter rainfall patterns, thereby changing farming practices, household behavior, and welfare. Households all over the world use a variety of formal and informal mechanisms to manage risk and cope with unexpected events that negatively affect incomes, assets, or well-being. These mechanisms include both preparation for and responses to natural disasters. In low-income settings, where formal insurance and government supports are limited, households tend to rely on informal coping strategies, such as transfers from friends and neighbors, remittances, or investments in a diverse range of assets, from livestock to human capital. When disaster-related shock affects only a few households at a time, informal mechanisms can be quite effective in dealing with the situation. However, if the shock affects large areas simultaneously, small-scale coping mechanisms become ineffective. Research on several climate-related national disasters—the 1998 floods in Bangladesh, the 2001 drought in Ethiopia, and the 2001–02 failed maize harvest in Malawi—suggests that the upcoming negotiations in Copenhagen need to explicitly define, support, and expand policies that protect vulnerable populations from the expected increase in climate-change related weather events.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in its series 2020 vision briefs with number
16(12).