ex ante impact assessment and seasonal climate forecasts: status and issues philip thornton...
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Ex ante impact assessmentand seasonal climate forecasts:
status and issues
Philip Thornton
International Livestock Research Institute, Nairobi, Kenya
Institute of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
International Workshop on Climate Predictionand Agriculture: Advances and Challenges
WMO, Geneva, 11-13 May 2005
Outline
• Ex ante impact assessment
• Some methods and tools
• Impact assessment and climate forecasting
• Moving the agenda forward
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Presentation focus
• Ex ante methods of assessing impacts at an aggregated level
• potential societal impacts of change in agricultural systems
• Change as a result of
• indigenous innovation
• research (technology, policy)
• drivers such as population growth
3
Presentation focus
• A large and growing literature on ex ante assessment of climate forecast use at the household and individual level
• Much less seems to have been done at aggregated levels
4
A traditional view of impact assessment
YearZ
Research costs
Extension costs
Adoption costs on-farm
Adapted from Randolph et al. (2001)
Impacts
5
A traditional view of impact assessment
• A vast literature exists based on this model
• The effectiveness of this type of ex ante IA is dependent on monitoring and evaluation
• In practice, if things cannot be valued relatively easily, they tend to be ignored
• Sees the innovation process as being highly linear and one-way
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Sayer and Campbell (2003)
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Another view of impact assessment
Year0
Adaptation, uptake, dis-adoption
YearY
%
SubsystemIdentification
Reflection
Action
Adaptation
UpdatingSuccessive INRMlearning cycles
Implementation costs of doing INRM
Impacts on:
• Production• Income• Food security• Vulnerability• Adaptive capacity• ...
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Questions of ex ante impact assessment
However the innovation process is seen, it involves some sequence of change uptake impact, and there are common questions to be answered:
• Who are the clients?
• Impact where?
• Impact on whom?
• Which impacts?
• How to value the impacts?9
Who are the clients for ex ante impact assessment?
• Policy makers at national, regional, local level (decisions to be made in pursuit of policy objectives)
• Donors (priority setting, targeting)
• Researchers (priority setting, targeting)
• Private sector (investment decisions)
• General public (direct impacts of the use of public resources)
10
Impact where, and on whom?
• Physical location – “recommendation domains”, targeting
• Characteristics of target populations in these areas
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Site selection, Sub-Saharan Africa Challenge Programme
Spatial data • Administrative boundaries• Climatological data• Farming systems• Length of growing period• Livestock populations• Market access• Human population• Soils and erosion risk• Vegetation cover• Protected areas• Watersheds, lakes, rivers
Non-spatial data
• Institutional environment• Policy environment• Local livelihood options• Critical health issues• Broad poverty trends• Social capital• Commercial sector linkages• Added value• Representative-ness• Potential for impact
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Site characteristic
Kano, Katsina, Maradi
Lake KivuZimbabwe-
Mozambique-Malawi corridor
LGP (months) 2.5 - 6 > 9 >5 - 10
Annual rainfall (mm)
500-1100 1,500-2,000 700 - 800
ReliefMostly flat intersected with inland valleys
Mostly mountainous
From mountainous to flat plains towards coast
Policy environment Medium Weaker Weaker
Market environment
Medium Weaker Medium
Institutional environment
Stronger Weaker Stronger
Principal NRM issue Soil nutrients VulnerabilitySoil fertility
management
Site area (km2) 83,900 19,500 274,000
SSA-CP site selection
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SSA-CP extrapolationdomain for Lake Kivu
Elevation > 1500 mRainfall > 800 mmPop density > 50 / km2
Access indicator < 90
Area 19,500 361,700 km2
Population (2000) 15 69 millionPopulation (2030) 29 131 million
Notenbaert (2004)14
Which impacts, and how to value them?
Which impacts will depend on the situation:
• Production, productivity
• Poverty alleviation
• Food security
• Environment
• Capacity building
• Commodity prices for consumers
• Others ...15
Commercial
• Raise calves for market (reproductive capacity of the herd is key)
• Age-sex composition of the herd is carefully controlled
• Want quick turn-over in calf production
• Cull unproductive animals
Communal
• Maintain cattle as a capital and social asset
• Maintain as large a herd as possible, sell animals only in extremis
• Practise goat production as a hedge against drought
• Do not under-utilise pasture
Production objectives of livestock keepers inVryberg District, Northwest Province, RSA
Hudson (2002)16
Mixed crop-livestock systems in Kenya and N Tanzaniaafter Seré and Steinfeld (1996)
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Population
(persons km-2)
% of land cultivated
Small intensive SSI >250 >20
Medium intensive MSI 100-250 10 - 20
Medium semi-intensive MSSI 30-100 1.5 - 10
Medium extensive MSE <30 0 - 1.5
Characteristics of four maize-based mixed systems identified in the Eastern and Southern Africa region
Source: Thorne et al. (2002)
Functions
of livestock
Dairy, manure
Dairy, manure, draft
Draft, meat, manure
Draft, meat
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Method Description Pros, Cons Suitability for Assessing
Change Uptake Impacts
Ad hoc Informal assessment involving little analysis
Cheap and quick; sometimes not very good
Low Low Low
Scoring methods
Measurable indicators and weights assigned to a set of criteria and the results ranked
Intuitively appealing, hard to scale indicators to match policy objectives
Medium Medium Medium
Economic surplus
Estimate how change will improve on-farm productivity and reduce costs of production and consumer prices
Comprehensive, data demanding and needs analytical skill
High Medium Medium
“Harder” simulation models
Assess biophysical impacts at a range of scales using quantitative models
Data intensive, time consuming, difficult to calibrate and test
Low Low High
Evaluating the impacts (a subsample)
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Information needed for an ex ante assessment
Stage 1. Change (e.g. research)
Resources required
Time
Partnerships and skills
Intermediate and final outputs
Probability of success
Level of
uncertainty
Mod
Mod
Low
Mod
Mod-High
How to obtain
Peer review
Scoring methods
Econometric methods
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Stage 2. Uptake
Who, characteristics
Where, characteristics
Infrastructure needed
Policies needed
Adoption rate, ceiling
Costs involved
Level of
uncertainty
Mod
Mod
High
High
High
Mod-High
How to obtain
GIS, surveys
GIS, surveys
GIS
Surveys
Scoring methods
Scoring methods
Information needed for an ex ante assessment
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Stage 3. Impact quantification
Production
Income
Environment
Capacity building
Costs, prices, elasticities
Level of
uncertainty
Mod
Mod
High
High
Mod
How to obtain
Biophysical models
Household models
Models, scoring
Scoring methods
Lit review, surveys
Information needed for an ex ante assessment
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Challenges in doing ex ante impact assessmentsrelated to climate forecasts
1. The nature of climate forecasts
Which impacts to measure?Seasonal climate forecasts may modify risk, and this has to be taken into account
Impacts on whom?People grow crops and keep livestock for various reasons, not all to do with food production and cash generation
How to assess uptake?Seasonal forecasts may be inaccurateTheir uptake will depend on credibility of the source and forecast skill
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Challenges in doing ex ante impact assessmentsrelated to climate forecasts
2. The need to assess impacts across time and space
Which impacts to measure?
Aggregate impacts of seasonal climate forecast use may substantially modify local prices
Impacts of modified management may be felt over entire production cycles, or even multiple production cycles
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Challenges in doing ex ante impact assessmentsrelated to climate forecasts
3. Assessing what is required of the institutional and policy environments
How to assess uptake?
What support is likely to be necessary, and how much may it cost to set in place and maintain?
25
Information needed for an ex ante assessmentrelated to seasonal climate forecasts
Stage 1. Change (e.g. implementation)
Resources required
Time
Partnerships and skills
Probability of different levels of success
Level of
uncertainty
Mod
Mod
High
High
How to obtain
Scoring methods
Peer review
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Stage 2. Uptake
Who, characteristics
Where, characteristics
Infrastructure needed
Policies needed
Adoption rate, ceiling
Costs involved
Level of
uncertainty
Mod
Mod
High
High
High
High
How to obtain
GIS, surveys
GIS, surveys
GIS
Surveys
Scoring methods
Scoring methods
Information needed for an ex ante assessmentrelated to seasonal climate forecasts
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Stage 3. Impact quantification
Production
Income, risk and food security
Changes in vulnerability
Changes in adaptive capacity
Capacity building
Costs, prices, elasticities
Level of
uncertainty
Mod
Mod-High
High
High
High
Mod-High
How to obtain
Biophysical models
Household models
Models, scoring?
Models, scoring?
Scoring methods
Lit review, surveys
Information needed for an ex ante assessmentrelated to seasonal climate forecasts
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Future developments to help overcome the challenges
1 Understanding better who the potential clients are, and what characterises them
• Partly a question of spatial info (poverty maps, new continental/global data layers, etc)
• But also a question of information on non-spatial determinants of poverty and vulnerability, how decision makers actually make decisions, information flows and power structures in communities, etc
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Future developments to help overcome the challenges
2 Developing tools that are better able to cope with the demands of climate forecast assessment
May need new or adapted behavioural frameworks, beyond profit or utility maximisation, to take account of impacts on
• food security• reduction of household vulnerability• increases in household adaptive capacity
Different types of models may help: agent based, systems dynamics
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Future developments to help overcome the challenges
3 Developing approaches that combine quantitative and qualitative elements
Linked also to provision of baseline data, for monitoring and evaluation
That can then be linked to ex post impact assessments, so that the lessons learned from this whole process can be applied elsewhere in the pursuit of poverty alleviation goals
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Future developments to help overcome the challenges
4 Making the process of impact assessment participatory
The process is often as important as (if not more important than) the results of the analysis
Getting all stakeholders involved in thinking broadly about the problems involved and the potential impacts
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