Climate change adaptation on Mount Elgon, Uganda
Twin’s climate change adaptation pilot project with Gumutindo Coffee Cooperative in Uganda.
Climate change is threatening the livelihoods of millions of smallholders who need to adapt their farming practices in order to survive. To address this, Twin has launched an ambitious climate change strategy to help farmer organisations identify risks and vulnerabilities and to develop adaptation plans to tackle these.
The Welsh Assembly and Comic Relief funded the first phase of Twin’s strategy, a pilot climate change adaptation project with our member organisation, Gumutindo Coffee Cooperative in Uganda. This project has enabled Twin to develop a best practice approach for supporting smallholder adaptation, which will be rolled out to other partner organisations.
Background
Members of Gumutindo live in the upland valleys of Mount Elgon, where they produce high quality organic and Fairtrade certified coffee. Climate change presents a serious threat to these smallholder coffee farmers who are already suffering from increased climate variability. Impacts include longer drought periods and heavier rainfall which in turn lead to poor quality coffee cherry, low yields and severe erosion.
In March 2010 following extremely heavy rains, they experienced a devastating landslide which killed over 300 people that live and farm in the Bududa District on Mount Elgon. A further 35 people lost their lives, and many others their livelihoods, in another landslide in August 2011.
Twin’s work with Gumutindo
Gumutindo’s farmers are working with Twin to plan and implement activities that enhance the climate resilience of its members and the wider community, and to raise awareness about the impacts of climate change.
Combining local knowledge and coping strategies with scientific climate projections, farmers have prioritised specific adaptation activities to help protect against the impacts of climate change - specifically soil erosion and soil fertility.
As a first step, participating farmers are commencing a community cow-share project with Send-a-Cow Uganda to provide organic manure to enhance soil fertility, as well as the added benefits of improved family health and diversified income sources from milk. A tree nursery and training scheme is also being implemented with funding from the Waterloo Foundation to enhance soil stability through reforestation and improve coffee quality by increasing shade.
We will take what we learn from this first phase of the project to scale-up activities across Gumutindo’s membership and to develop a robust adaptation methodology which can be applied in other vulnerable regions.
Next steps
Twin aims to utilise the market linkages that producer organisations have, to try and secure private sector funding for adaptation activities. Considerable funding is needed to support coffee farmers to adapt to climate change and commercial stakeholders can play a role in this.
