The Climate Emergency: How Africa Can Survive and Thrive

Beyond doom and gloom lie real solutions offered by African farmers

As the world's largest climate summit and negotiations, COP27, continues in the Red Sea Riviera town of Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) is pleased to officially launch the publication of "THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY: How Africa can Survive and Thrive" a new book in the Barefoot Guide Agroecology Series.

The climate emergency affects us all deeply, in so many ways. But for farmers, it has more drastic implications. It undermines all aspects of the food systems that they depend on. Extreme weather devastates their crops and livestock and destabilises the very water cycle that they are intimately a part of.

Today, the majority of the solutions put forth and funded by governments and donors to address these problems are, in the long term, making things worse. Industrial agricultural methods, posing as "Climate Smart Agriculture", encourage excessive use of chemical inputs on plants and in the soil, another example of the false solutions brought by the rich and powerful.

​But there is a different narrative at work in Africa. The stories in this AFSA Barefoot Guide show that African farmers, long seen as victims, are beginning to implement lasting, sustainable solutions to the climate crisis in Africa. Indeed, they are examples that could well be followed by all farmers.

Through agroecology practices, not only are farmers naturally adapting to the inevitable and growing harm of the climate crisis, but they can also make significant contributions to its mitigation. Read this Barefoot Guide to find out how.