Agricultural households’ adaptation to weather shocks in SubSaharan Africa: What implications for land-use change and deforestation?

Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa is regularly threatened by the occurrence of weather shocks due to extreme events as well as inter-annual and intra-seasonal climate variability. In this paper, we wonder whether the way farmers respond to shocks can affect land-use and induce deforestation, a question that has only been marginally studied in the literature. We conduct a review of the impacts of weather shocks on agriculture, and review thestrategies used by farmers to cope with and adapt to these threats. We then wonder how these strategies can affect land-use, drawing from the land-use change literature, and reviewing publications that have connected weather shocks, adaptation and land-use change. It appears that weather shocks can induce land-use change both in the short and long-term, with some practices leading to land conversion while others may foster conservation. However, many effects remain ambiguous, and are likely to depend on socioeconomic and geographic factors.