Integrating economic measures of adaptation effectiveness into climate change interventions: A case study of irrigation development in Mwea, Kenya

PLoS One. 2020 Dec 11;15(12):e0243779. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0243779. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

As climate change adaptation is becoming a recognized policy issue, the need is growing for quantitative economic evaluation of adaptation-related public investment, particularly in the context of climate finance. Funds are meant to be allocated not to any types of beneficial investments with or without climate change but to projects regarded as effective for climate change adaptation based on some metrics. But attempts at such project-specific evaluation of adaptation effects are few, in part because such assessments require an integration of various types of simulation analyses. Against this background, we conduct a case study of a Kenyan irrigation development project using a combination of downscaled climate data, runoff simulations, yield forecasting, and local socioeconomic projections to examine the effects of interventions specifically attributable to climate change adaptation, i.e., how much irrigation development can reduce the negative effects of climate change in the future. The results show that despite the uncertainties in precipitation trends, increased temperatures due to climate change have a general tendency to reduce rice yields, and that irrigation development will mitigate income impacts from the yield loss-for example, for the median scenario, the household income loss of 6% in 2050 due to climate change without irrigation development is flipped to become positive with the project. This means that the irrigation development project will likely be effective as a means for climate change adaptation.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Agriculture / economics*
  • Agriculture / methods*
  • Climate Change*
  • Hydrology
  • Kenya
  • Water Supply

Associated data

  • figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.13147598.v3

Grants and funding

This study is funded by JICA and the JICA Ogata Research Institute (JICA-RI), which also provided various logistical support. Daiju Narita acknowledges financial support from JSPS Kakenhi (Grant Numbers: 17KT0066 and 17K00677) for his research activities. Besides logistical support, the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.