Agricultural Greenhouse Gases from Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Climate change has variously been diagnosed as perhaps the most challenging issue that confronts the twenty-first century, and especially for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the impacts of a changing climate have already been felt in most regions and in various sectors of the economy principally, agriculture. Agriculture on the subcontinent, although still very rudimentary in terms of management practices and production efficiency, provides the mainstay for majority of the people and is heavily climate dependent. This makes climate change an issue requiring immediate and effective interventions, viz. adaptation and resilience building to safeguard the livelihood of over a billion people. This chapter looks at sub-Saharan African agriculture, its contribution to the emission of greenhouse gases and their pathways by using the FAOSTAT system and the other literature on emission research from peer-reviewed journals. An attempt is also made to gauge the effects of a changing climate on SSA agricultural productivity. The contribution of SSA agriculture to the socio-economic well-being of its people is also discussed. Adaptation and resilience building among the dominating smallholder farmers in the region are captured, and the factors that hinder the effective scaling up of strategies aimed at ameliorating the effects of climate variability on local agriculture.