Building Resilience for an Unpredictable Future: How Organic Agriculture Can Help Farmers Adapt to Climate Change
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In the face of global climate change, farmers must adapt their practices to deal with changing temperatures and more frequent extreme weather events. These adaptations must first and foremost build resilience within the agroecosystem, increasing its ability to continue functioning when faced with unexpected events. Climate change adaptation as a topic broadly encompasses many fields and areas where response will increasingly be needed. This paper focuses on climate change adaptation for farme rs, especially those in Least Developed Countries (LDCs). These farmers are among the most vulnerable to climate change because they rely heavily on agriculture as their primary sector and need affordable solutions, based on their own resources and skills, to prevent excessive losses. This paper has chosen to explore the potential of Organic Agriculture (OA) in adaptation efforts because ecological approaches to food production offer farmers in LDCs affordable, accessible opportunities to strengthen their farms’ resilience. While certified organic farmers are relatively uncommon in developing countries, though their numbers are increasing, millions of farmers in LDCs base their farming practices on ecological principles acquired through millennia of experimentation and adaptation to local conditions. OA relies as much as possible ecological processes and on a farm’s own resources, which reduces monetary costs to farmers and reduces the non-renewable resources used in farming. It is therefore assumed that OA offers adaptation options that allow farmers to use on-farm resources to build resilience, rather than rely on expensive external inputs. Many indigenous farming practices are already based on ecology, and combining the best of traditional knowledge with support from ecological science offers farmers in developing countries an opportunity for success.