Risques climatiques et sécurité alimentaire et nutritionnelle au Niger : cartographie des impacts et des besoins de résilience

Since the great droughts of the 1970s and even today, climate risks have been the major challenge facing by the main agricultural and pastoral activities in the Sahel and particularly in Niger. This article maps the impacts of climate threats on food security in three regions of Niger and suggests resilience solutions. The vulnerability analysis approach describing the cause-and-effect relationships between climate change and its impacts on populations, economic sectors, and socio-ecological systems, associated with the notion of impact chains inspired from the ClimProspect model, is used to characterize exposure, sensitivity, and potential impacts. The analysis shows that drought constitutes the main risk which affects agro-silvopastoral production through reductions in food production, the number of animals and their productivity, agricultural income, the disappearance of certain valuable tree species with the consequence of food insecurity and even food and nutrition crises and entrenched poverty. The factors that explain the vulnerability of rural households to food crises are land degradation and insufficiency, poverty, dysfunction of mechanisms and devices for crisis prevention and management and especially the rainfed and rudimentary nature of agro-pastoral activities. They are grouped into four groups - V1, V2, V3 and V4 - serving as benchmarks or decision support tools for efficient and effective responses established in the form of classes of climate risk resilience needs.