SoCoCA - Socioeconomic Concequences of Climate Change in Sub-equatorial Africa (completed)
Future climate changes how will they influence the water resources in sub-equatorial Africa? How can agriculture adapt to a warmer climate and changes in precipitation patterns? What will the socioeconomic consequences be?
About the project
Climate change is likely to have large impacts in sub-equatorial Africa in many sectors, since the projected climate changes are large and the vulnerability is increased due to other development challenges. Agriculture is a key economic sector in this region that could be significantly affected by changes in water resources related to climate change. Due to the importance of agriculture in developing countries these changes may have widespread socioeconomic consequences.
The first task of SoCoCA will be to improve and spatially refine the projections of climate change themselves within the region. Then the consequences of these changes in key parameters, such as temperature, precipitation, evaporation, etc., are assessed in terms of changes in water resources and in agricultural productivity. The next task is then to address a wide range of societal challenges linked to adaptation to climate change. Necessarily, in this project we have to limit and focus our scope and we have chosen a region and a topic of study that we consider most important, namely socioeconomic changes in relation to agriculture in sub-equatorial Africa, which controls the food production in the region. On a longer perspective, our approach can be extended to include other sectors, such as hydropower energy production and forestry, and lay the ground for studies of health issues related to climate change. A hierarchy of numerical models will be used in SoCoCA.
- The Research Council of Norway, RCN.
SoCoCa started August 2008 and ends September 2013.