The important role that local knowledge and practices can play in reducing risk and
improving disaster preparedness is now acknowledged by disaster risk reduction
specialists, especially since the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. However,
they have yet to be commonly used by communities, scientists, practitioners and policymakers.
The recent Red Cross experience acting on forecasts in west Africa provides examples of how climate information can be linked to decisions and serve development in low-income regions, and how climate and weather forecasts may become useful to communities at risk from climatic events, provided that the obstacles thwarting these communities’ access to and use of forecasts are clearly identified a
Agroforestry systems are complex assemblages of ecosystem components, each of which responds to climate. Whereas climate change impacts on crops grown in monocultures can reasonably well be projected with process-based crop models, robust models for complex agroforestry systems are not available.
The climate change research community’s shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) are a set of alternative global development scenarios focused on mitigation of and adaptation to climate change.
This paper examines the development and use of scenarios as an approach to guide action in multi-level, multi-actor adaptation contexts such as food security under climate change. Three challenges are highlighted: (1) ensuring the appropriate scope for action; (2) moving beyond intervention-based decision guidance; and (3) developing long-term shared capacity for strategic planning.
Ethnopharmacological relevance: Purgative enemas form an integral part of African traditional medicine. Besides possible benefits, serious health risks of rectal herbal therapy have been described in literature. To design appropriate health education programs, it is essential to understand traditional herbal practices and local perceptions of health and illness.
Ethnopharmacological relevance: Waterborne diseases such as diarrhoea are common world wide, including in Bizana, South Africa where the majority of rural dwellers depend largely on water from unprotected sources. The people from Bizana use medicinal plants as their first line of health care to cure and prevent diarrhoea.
Aims of the study: Commercially important indigenous medicinal plants of southern Africa are reviewed in the context of fundamental knowledge about their ethnobotany, phylogeny, genetics, taxonomy, biochemistry, chemical variation, reproductive biology and horticulture.
South Africa is a country with both rich floral biodiversity and cultural diversity. Traditional herbal medicines form an important part of the healthcare of most South Africans, and relies heavily on the use of indigenous plants.
Conservation Agriculture (CA) is being advocated to enhance soil health and sustain long term crop productivity in the developing world. One of CA’s key principles is the maintenance of soil cover often by retaining a proportion of crop residues on the field as mulch. Yet smallholder crop–livestock systems across Africa and Asia face trade-offs among various options for crop residue use.