Climate

West Africa is projected to experience substantial warming and shifts in precipitation during the critical June-September growing season.  The map below (left) shows temperature increases (in a high emissions scenario) from 1.0-2.5 C by the 2050s. These impacts will be even greater for Senegal's inland and arid regions. The map (right) shows projected rainfall changes. These are more uncertain but indicate drier median conditions in the west (up to a 20% decline in rainfall) and slightly wetter conditions in the east (up to 10% increase).

Economy

The Senegalese agricultural sector is low in productivity and the country is food-deficit. Over the last ten years, domestic production has covered between 30% and 65% of annual cereal needs. Imported rice, wheat, and maize have covered the remaining gap (ANSD, 2016).
Income poverty is high in the region; although efforts and policies over the last decade have lowered the poverty rate to 46.7% in 2011. Poverty is more pronounced in rural areas with an incidence of 57.1% compared to 26.1% in Dakar (PSE, 2014).
 

Agricultural Production Systems

Agriculture is dependent on climate conditions and is mostly dominated by smallholder farmers. The main crops grown are related to groundnut, cereals (millet, maize, rice, sorghum, etc) and horticulture (onion, tomato, potato, etc). Livestock accounts for 4.3% of the GDP and is practiced by 29.5% of households (République du Sénégal, 2020a). In 2019, national meat production was estimated at 267 358 tons while milk production was 264.4 millions of liter (ANSD, 2019). However, climate change has induced challenges in agricultural performance. The decrease in rainfall and the recurrence of extreme events (droughts) resulted in a decline in agricultural productivity and farmers’ livelihoods.

Current climate policies are oriented towards the promotion of adaptation strategies. Through its approved National Determined Contributions, the country aims to invest in adaptation and mitigations strategies to conditionally reduce GHG emissions by 29% by 2030 (République du Sénégal, 2020b). In the agricultural sector, climate-smart agriculture programs are predominant with a focus on improved varieties, management practices changes and climate information services.

However, barriers remain in the implementation of effective adaptation strategies. Adaptation strategies are implemented at the local level, while national adaptation policies fail to account for local context and realities. Despite, local institutions often lack human and financial resources or are not consulted by the State to reflect their needs in the local development plans. In addition, the lack of disaggregated and high quality data, in particular at the local level, adds challenges in climate change planning policies. A vulnerability assessment study in the Groundnut Basin has shown that the absence of agricultural data and difficulties to access to climate data were impediments to perform crop modelling and identify robust adaptation options based on evidence (Faye, Camara, Noblet, & Mboup, 2019).

The development of scenarios were relevant to characterize future agricultural systems in line with the country’s vision of economic development and climate policies. Three scenarios of future plausible agricultural systems (RAPs) were developed during the study, in collaboration with stakeholders. These RAPs are: Business As Usual, Sustainable Development and Fossil Fuel (see figure below). They included reflexions around:

• Agricultural policies by identifying the main agricultural drivers and where investments would improve farmers’ outcomes.

• Climate change policies with a focus on adaptation/mitigation strategies

• What role energy resources, especially oil and gas discoveries would play in agricultural and economic development?

• Which socioeconomic improvements can be envisioned through gender equity, poverty reduction, access to social services? Which national policies and drivers would lead to those changes.

• The importance/influence of different group of stakeholders, in particular civil society and grassroot organizations in shaping future policies.

The adaptation package is based on known factors that could increase crops yields and livestock revenues under future climate conditions changes, given the uptake of policies or interventions that would enable the adoption of these adaptation strategies. The different components include genetic improvements on the cereals cultivar, a narrower window planting, and improvement of management practices. The management practices increase the planting density combined with more fertilizer applied, which is feasible due to interventions that improve farmers’ access to fertilizers.

The second component in the adaptation package refers to investments in livestock to improve milk/meat production (with a particular emphasis on products quality enhancement) and herders revenues. These investments include fodder banks to facilitate their availability to the cattle. In addition, adaptation packages anticipate services to improve pasture management along with market access improvements.