Crop–Livestock Intensification in the Face of Climate Change: Exploring Opportunities to Reduce Risk and Increase Resilience in Southern Africa By Using an Integrated Multi-Modeling Approach.

Crop-livestock farming systems which are predominant in Africa, are complex with various interrelated ecological and economic factors. They involve multiple products or benefits (intended and non-intended), with trade-offs and synergies occurring both on- and off-site and varying over time. Understanding both simplistic relationships and complex interactions between climate and agricultural production systems to determine overall system efficiency and impacts on human wellbeing is a major challenge. Computer based tools coupled with participatory approaches for systems integrated assessments have the potential to resolve multiple dimensions of these complex systems. The products of these environmental, economic and social analyses are important in the development of climate smart adaptation strategies. In order to reduce burdening the environment and contribute to resilience and sustained production capacity highly efficient technologies are required. While some advances have been made in technology generation, their assessment for delivery of crop-livestock systems has lagged behind. We use the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) Regional Integrated Assessment procedure using (i) a multi-modeling framework of climate, crop, livestock and economic simulation models, and (ii) representative agricultural pathways (RAPs) generated with stakeholders to define plausible future socio-economic conditions and feasible adaptation options. Simulation results show that climate change will have an impact on crop-livestock production systems hence smallholder farmers’ wellbeing will also affected. However impacts will be varied, the three farm categories studied will not be affected to the same degree due to agricultural management practices, wealth status among other factors. Tailoring adaptation packages to different farm categories assists in developing context specific technologies to buffer the impacts of climate change. Improved on-farm high quality fodder production (inclusion of fodder and grain legume) and growing medium duration maize varieties would off-set  impacts of  climate change (CC) by about 20-30% for farmers with livestock. For those farmers without livestock (>40 % of rural population) by diversifying on-farm crop production, improved management and growing medium duration crop varieties can reduce economic losses due to CC from -25% to 19%. The integrated approach can evaluate impacts of CC on both agricultural production and also human wellbeing which is imperative in developing context specific national adaptation strategies.