Adaptation to climate change and other stressors among commercial and small-scale South African farmers

Commercial and small-scale farmers in South Africa are exposed to many challenges. Interviews with 44 farmers in the upper Thukela basin, KwaZulu-Natal, were conducted to identify common and specific challenges for the two groups and adaptive strategies for dealing with the effects of climate and other stressors. This work was conducted as part of a larger participatory project with local stakeholders to develop a local adaptation plan for coping with climate variability and change. Although many challenges related to exposure to climate variability and change, weak agricultural policies, limited governmental support, and theft were common to both farming communities, their adaptive capacities were vastly different. Small-scale farmers were more vulnerable due to difficulties to finance the high input costs of improved seed varieties and implements, limited access to knowledge and agricultural techniques for water and soil conservation and limited customs of long-term planning. In addition to temperature and drought-related challenges, small-scale farmers were concerned about soil erosion, water logging and livestock diseases, challenges for which the commercial farmers already had efficient adaptation strategies in place. The major obstacle hindering commercial farmers with future planning was the lack of clear directives from the government, for example, with regard to issuing of water licences and land reform. Enabling agricultural communities to procure sustainable livelihoods requires implementation of strategies that address the common and specific challenges and strengthen the adaptive capacity of both commercial and small-scale farmers. Identified ways forward include knowledge transfer within and across farming communities, clear governmental directives and targeted locally adapted finance programmes.     

Oxygen saturation trends in the Baltic Sea

Marine monitoring programmes are seldom planned and realized to fulfil the requirements of the statistical methods used. The shortcomings of these methods are rarely discussed in the literature. In this work two different methods for trend analysis are applied to a real case and attention is given to the possible violation of the underlying assumptions. Long-term changes in oxygen supersaturation in the Baltic Sea are the object of the study. Linear regression and non-parametric methods are those chosen. The linear regression gave significantly increasing trends of oxygen saturation in Arkona, Eastern Gotland basin and in the Bothnian Sea, but the tested assumptions turned out to be violated. The corresponding non-parametric trend test only confirmed the increasing trend in Arkona. It is suggested that non-parametric methods, like the one used in this work, should be favoured in the future for similar types of marine environmental data.