The Climate Emergency: How Africa Can Survive and Thrive

"Healing our land together is immediate, real and doable. So is healing the cohesion of our community."

The stories in this Barefoot Guide show that African farmers, long seen as victims, are beginning to implement lasting, sustainable solutions to the climate crisis in Africa. The guide was produced by ​the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), a broad-based alliance of different civil society actors that are part of the struggle for food sovereignty and agroecology in Africa.

The book's 5 chapters show how, through agroecology practices, not only are African farmers naturally adapting to the inevitable and growing harm of the climate crisis, but they can also make significant contributions to its mitigation. It includes vignettes and resources such as the following guidelines for an agroecology approach to climate change adaptation:

1. Enable and support the restoration of ecological literacy and practices across communities to increase levels of biodiversity and vegetative cover on the soil.
2. Recognise that priorities to adapt to climate change are unique to each context and use creative and flexible processes based on co-creating knowledge and learning.
3. Build on local knowledge and customary governance and bylaws, enabling the revival of bio-cultural knowledge and practices that help communities regenerate and sustain resilience of their natural resource base (soils, trees, vegetation, water, beneficial insects and micro-organisms, and biodiversity).
4. Pay special attention to involving those often excluded from community activities to consider their specific needs and concerns.
5. Emphasise action-oriented collaboration amongst all relevant stakeholders towards community ownership and dynamic and inspiring leadership, so as to help diagnose climate-related problems, seek and test promising solutions, and assess results in terms of increased resilience to climate change.
6. Enable documentation and learning of how to better adapt to climate change at every step of the way by everyone involved in order to amplify and spread the work begun at a small scale, to quickly spread within and across communities in a given landscape.
7. Seek out and support ways to enable household-to-household and community-to-community learning and self-spread of identified new practices for landscape regeneration and adaptation to climate change.
8. Develop structures for fostering mobilisation and organisation of volunteers and local leaders within and across communities located in an agroecological landscape to promote collective action and build local ownership, competency, and leadership.

The final chapter includes a call for adaptation, resilience, and mitigation through agroecology to the November 2022 Climate Change Conference (COP 27) and beyond.