Toward Enhancing Resilience to Climate and Ecosystem Changes in Semi-Arid Africa: Evidence from Northern Ghana

Abstract

With societies, communities, and households continually experiencing changes in social, economic, and environmental conditions, building resilience to mitigate and adapt to shocks and stresses associated with these inherent changes has become an urgent matter. Development of a comprehensive resilience assessment framework with the active engagement of multiple relevant stakeholders can foster the adoption and promotion of plausible and practical resilience enhancement strategies among vulnerable groups. The interdisciplinary research project called 'Enhancing Resilience to Climate and Ecosystem Changes in Semi-Arid Africa: An Integrated Approach' (CECAR-Africa) was initiated in 2010 as part of the Science and Technology Research Partnership for Sustainable Development (SATREPS) program for international research into pressing global issues by researchers in Japan and developing countries. CECAR-Africa aimed to contribute to filling gaps in resilience assessment whilst proposing tested, practical and sustainable resilience enhancement strategies for use in socio-ecological regions with a special focus on flood and drought-prone rural communities and households in semiarid Northern Ghana.