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Author for correspondence: Kate Elizabeth Gannon, E-mail: [email protected]
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Unlocking the existing adaptive capacities of women, farmers and businesses in semi-arid areas is key to realizing the SDGs.
Introduction
Semi-arid lands (SALs) in developing countries are high-risk climate change ‘hotspots’ (De Souza et al., 2015; Huang et al., 2016; Tucker et al., 2015). They occupy over 15% of the earth's land surface (Safriel et al., 2005) and are home to approximately one billion people, including some of the poorest and least food secure (Middleton et al., 2011; Tucker et al., 2015). In Africa and Asia, these populations rely heavily on rain-fed agriculture, pastoralism and agricultural processing for their livelihoods, making them particularly exposed to climate and environmental variability. In addition, SALs in these regions are often remote, politically and economically marginalized areas that have limited access to markets, infrastructure and services (Middleton et al., 2011; Thorpe & Maestre, 2015; Tucker et al., 2015). Formal institutions and legal frameworks are typically underdeveloped, with land, water and other resource rights often insecure and unequally distributed.
Climate change will exacerbate the challenges faced by SALs, as global warming trends are expected to be particularly intense in these regions (Huang et al., 2016; IPCC, 2014), with droughts and floods already becoming more severe. This confluence of climate and non-climate risks, combined with broader socio-economic inequalities, means climate hazards will affect poor populations in SALs disproportionately. Yet to date SALs have been given limited attention in international climate policy. This represents a major threat to the pledge within the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda to ‘leave no one behind’, and the Paris Agreement commitment to take into account the urgent and immediate needs of those that are particularly vulnerable to climate change.
In this paper we argue that national governments have underestimated opportunities for climate resilient development in SALs and we revisit and update literatures which highlight ways in which the adaptive capacity of SAL populations has been undermined by current adaptation and development policy and practice. In response, we call for a refocusing on approaches to supporting climate resilience in SALs that build on the opportunities of SALs and concentrate on leveraging the inherent adaptive capacities and flexibility of...