Cross-geography adaptation to climate change in coffee-growing regions: is it risk-specific or generalized?
Authors: Maskell Gina , Achola Sarah Murabula , Undorf Sabine , Romanovska Paula , Gornott Christoph 
Published: February 2023

Climate change adaptation assessments are often undertaken at a local to regional scale and are necessitated as such due to their contextual nature. On-farm decision-making in the face of a changing climate is driven by multiple factors and local contexts. Yet, we see parallels between implementation of certain adaptation strategies, in regions on opposite sides of the world. &#160;This can be due to global connections, information exchange, and the parallel evolvement of similar agricultural adaptation responses. Some of these agriculture adaptation responses are risk-specific, such as implementation of irrigation systems (which addresses the risk of low precipitation events). Other adaptation responses, such as agroforestry, address general risk (in this case, also non-climatic risks, such as price drop on the global market). In a recent systematic review covering empirical literature on adaptation responses, the majority (~58%) of adaptation responses address the non-specific risk of &#8220;general climate change&#8221; (Berrang-Ford, et al., 2020). To date, there are very few empirical cross- or multiple geography assessments of adaptation, and to our knowledge none that look at the relationship between adaptation uptake and present risks.Here, we explore the link between parallel adaptation uptake and parallel climatic risk (or hazard). Is adaptation occurring risk-specific or generalized? Is there a pattern between specific/generalized adaptation strategies and single/multi-hazard climatic trends? Looking at the case study of coffee smallholders, we analyze the relationship between regional climatic trends and adaptation measures undertaken, using the examples of coffee agroforestry or intercropping (generalized), and improved seed varieties (specific). Coffee makes an interesting case study because of the need to plan for the long-term, with a tree crop that produces for 20-30 years. We use a harmonized dataset of ~ 3000 coffee smallholder households, as part of the Rural Household Multi-Indicator Survey (RHoMIS; https://www.rhomis.org/) available for coffee growing regions in 10 countries in South and Central America, Africa, and Asia. We further use a range of climate indices derived from daily, gridded observational and reanalysis datasets including for example the fifth generation ECMWF atmospheric reanalysis (ERA5) starting in 1950 aggregated to spatial scales relevant for comparison with the survey data. Our results offer a multi-geography analysis of the interlinkages between climate signals and adaptation patterns across coffee growing regions, as well as lend a conceptual discussion on designing and evaluating effective adaptation, in terms of generalized v. specified risk addressed.&#160;References-Berrang-Ford, L., Siders, A.R., Lesnikowski, A. et al. A systematic global stocktake of evidence on human adaptation to climate change. Nat. Clim. Chang. 11, 989&#8211;1000 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01170-y