By Laurie Goering
COPENHAGEN (AlertNet) - Plenty of challenges stand in the way of building successful ways to adapt to climate change -- from a lack of money to a deep-seated desire by many governments to
spend on big infrastructure projects and little else, experts at the Copenhagen climate change talks said this week.
But in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region, one of the driest and most hunger-prone parts of the country, the home-grown Relief Society of Tigray has managed to slash vulnerability to drought
by trying out a variety of simple techniques to capture, hold and then efficiently use water.
Tigray on average suffers a drought every three years. Almost all of its agricultural production relies on rain. In 2002 and 2003, a severe drought left 1.4 million people in the region
without enough food and dependent on international aid handouts, said Mulugeta Berehanu, head of environmental rehabilitation and agricultural development for the relief society.
Aware that climate change was likely to make things even worse, the Relief Society began investigating water capture methods used around the world - particularly in Tunisia and India - and trying them out in Tigray.
Farmers hand-dug trenches to collect rainwater. They created ponds to recharge the underground water table. They built small concrete dams across gullies to try to turn them into reservoirs and experimented with diverting rivers and burying underground water tanks. They tried drip irrigation.
Just as important, they worked to build the skills of local government officials, development agents, village council members and community leaders to manage and fine-tune the projects.
Many of the ideas worked. Using them, farmers have managed to boost the amount of irrigated land in Tigray from 4,000 hectares to 50,000 hectares. Within two years, irrigation will reach
300,000 hectares, Berehanu said.
Today half of the region's farmland benefits from some type of rain capture system, which means the next drought should have a lower toll in crop losses, hunger and need for foreign aid.
Best of all, farmers who had been deeply shaken by the increasing unpredictability of the weather -- to the point that many had stopped investing in their land to curb losses -- are now regaining confidence.
"There's a huge possibility for scaling up" the effort to more of Ethiopia and perhaps other parts of the world, Berehanu said.
What are the key lessons from the project? Ideas which are generated from the start at the community level, rather than being handed down from a higher authority, have the best chance of working, Berehanu said.
Breaking down water users into groups by watershed also makes sense, he said. And integrating adaptation efforts into existing development plans allows for a faster scaling up of successes.
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