Case studies on innovation

This section contains two case studies on innovation for sustainable livelihoods in response to climate change.

Case study

How a farmer in Maharashtra is adapting to drought

Read the article How Five Indian Communities Are Adapting to Climate Change before you read the case study.

A farmer in Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, a state in northern India and one of the country’s most drought-prone areas, has a small landholding. The farmer has been working in agriculture in a region with low-fertility soil, which requires large amounts of fertilisers and water to produce crops.

The farmer also has to cope with erratic rains and longer, harsher dry seasons, both of which are the result of climate change. Maharashtra faced significant droughts in 2005, 2007, 2013 and 2016. The villagers had no drinking water, and farmers abandoned their fields and migrated to nearby towns for work.

The farmers and villagers then adopted innovations to deal with their situation.

With help from local grassroots-level organisations, the villagers became involved in watershed management and efficient innovative farming techniques. The new farming techniques include using drip irrigation systems and shifting to new, drought-resistant crop varieties. The villagers benefited greatly from watershed programmes and outreach sessions that taught them how to prevent run-off from the hills. Gradually, the groundwater recharged, replenishing the water in wells and lakes.

The availability of water helped the farmer to introduce other crops, such as onions, soybeans, pomegranates and papayas, which sold for higher prices at market. Planting new varieties of fruits, vegetables and edible plants is an innovation.

The farmer also started to bury water diffusers — made of local material such as clay — connected to existing drip lines in the pomegranate garden to mitigate the effects of droughts. The diffusers helped to optimise water use during dry spells by moistening only the soil around the roots of the pomegranate trees. The use of clay pots as diffusers to trap water for the pomegranate trees is an innovative method.

Discuss the case study with community members using the notes provided in the discussion section.

Discussion

Why were the innovations in the case study above successful?

• Assistance from grassroots-level organisations that are knowledgeable about local climate conditions, watershed management and climate-responsive agricultural practices.
• Use of simple clay pots as diffusers — clay and mud are both naturally available at a local level and girls and women can use them to make clay pots.
• The women can make a sustainable living from selling clay pots to the farmers.
• Farmers tend to have more trust in local grassroots organisations than in outside groups that want to intervene and assist.
• The use of a diffuser where water drip lines exist was an innovative approach.
• Switching to cash crops that are easier to manage during drier periods was an innovative approach.
• The new crops that were planted fetch a higher price than traditional crops.

Reading

Chhabria, P., & Jacob, M. (2023, 7 March). How five Indian communities are adapting to climate change. World Economic Forum.

https://www.preventionweb.net/news/reviving-traditional-crops-climate-proofing-infrastructure-how-5-indian-communities-are
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence.

Reflection

Write in your personal journal what natural resources are found in abundance in your household or village and could be innovated in terms of planting, harvesting, processing and packaging.

Case study

Challenges during the implementation of innovations that damaged their effectiveness: Climate change and climate-smart agriculture adaptation among the farming community in the coastal region of Sundarban Biosphere Reserve in India

The Indian Sundarban Biosphere Reserve, a large coastal zone, is very vulnerable to frequent catastrophic climatic events. Severe storms affect the area every year, displacing village households and destroying crops. People in the area face daily social and economic struggles to survive: they live in remote locations, they experience extreme impacts of climate change and farmland is inundated by seawater because it is in a low-lying delta region traversed by many tributaries of major rivers.

Researchers looked at 12 farming villages in the Sundarban Biosphere Reserve to assess the effectiveness of climate-smart innovation techniques that had been implemented in them.

The climate-smart innovations were the use of local pesticides, rather than factory-produced ones, weather forecasts and early warning weather information; planting saline-tolerant varieties of crops; diversifying crops; and changing the planting times in the fields.

The communities faced many challenges — for example, lack of education and knowledge about climate-responsive interventions, insufficient organic materials for composting, low literacy rates among farmers and a shortage of labour to implement the climate-smart agriculture practices — which were noted and analysed.

Source: Das, S., & Sharma, K. K. (2023). Climate change and climate smart agriculture adaptation among the farming community in the coastal region of Sundarban Biosphere Reserve in India. Social Science Research Network. https://ssrn.com/abstract=4544318

Licence: Open access

Discussion

The coastal communities in this case study faced the following challenges:

• Inadequate knowledge about and awareness of the impacts of climate change, including weather conditions at a local level.
• Innovative design was NOT intimately linked to total farm productivity and revenue.
• Inadequate or lack of financial assistance to procure better crop varieties.
• Insufficient use of traditional techniques and biodiversity-friendly agriculture to combat the effects of pests and diseases.
• Inadequate training and capacity building of farmers.
• No holistic cooperation or partnerships among inter-governmental agencies.

Discuss these challenges with a small group of other learners.

Assessment

Formative assessment 1

Write a step-by-step approach on how to adapt innovation to mitigate climate change to suit your local context and situation. You can use simple illustrations with text. Invite relevant community leaders to discuss your ideas with you.

Group activity

Identify an innovation model to suit your local context

Create a step-by-step guide to design an innovation model that is applicable to your context:

• List all the important local livelihoods that are affected by climate change. Identify the people in your village or community who are affected.
• List all the local natural resources — for example, wetland plants for food and fodder, new seeds adapted for growing in a nursery, new crop varieties, tree species that could promote soil stabilisation — that are available.
• Identify new ideas or methods — for example, crop rotation, planting shallow-rooted and deep-rooted plants in alternate years, planting nitrogen-fixing plant species to improve soil fertility, using watershed management techniques, adopting new post-harvest techniques to keep produce fresh for longer — to counter the effects of climate change.
• Identify new products or services — for example, new activities relating to nature-based tourism.

With the help of the facilitator, discuss and outline how the new natural resources, methods or products that you listed can be explored further to create new sustainable livelihoods with relevant stakeholders at the local level. Use the information in this unit to guide you.

Reading

Defe, R., & Matsa, M. (2021). The contribution of climate smart interventions to enhance sustainable livelihoods in Chiredzi District. Climate Risk Management, 33: 100338. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crm.2021.100338

Licence: Open access; CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED