As a climate journalist, I get an eternal question from my fellow Americans: What should I do in the face of a crisis this big and complicated?
The answer I saw during a recent reporting trip to East and Southern Africa: everything.
In Malawi, subsistence farmers are reviving old crops, planting trees to feed their soil, sharing fertilizer with their neighbours, experimenting with different sowing techniques, all in an effort to cope with the drought, floods and cyclones that left them and hit right.
In Uganda, coffee farmers are beginning to move away from robusta, the type of coffee they have been growing and shipping abroad for decades, but which is falling prey to droughts and diseases exacerbated by climate change. Instead, they grow a totally different and harder coffee called excelsa, a variety of the native species Liberica.
In both countries I was struck by how aggressively people adapted. They were creative, they were pragmatic. They put one foot in front of the other and continued. They tried to be less poor, because being less poor is the best way to better withstand climate shocks.
I turned to Esther Lupafya for a better understanding. Lupafya used to work as a nurse at a local clinic. She took care of malnourished children and their mothers. She shifted her focus. She helped set up an organization called Soils, food and healthy communitiesdedicated to helping farmers grow better food and earn better incomes.
Lupafya’s group, known in the area as Soils, encourages farmers to try different techniques. They see what works, what doesn’t. They innovate. They check each other’s fields. Knowledge spreads. Seeds are shared.
“Farmers are working very hard to use technologies that will improve their soil,” Lupafya said. “They can see that this is what someone did. I can do it this way. Their cassava was wiped out. Mine, if I can make a chest back my cassava won’t be wiped out.
A boxwood ridge, a rectangular ridge around a plant designed to channel water, can prevent soil erosion. The leaves of Faidherbia albida, also called apple ring acacia tree, can fertilize the soil. Vetiver grass helps keep flooding at bay. Cover crops like peanuts are good for retaining moisture in the soil and producing something to sell in the market. Forgotten crops such as yams and finger millet can withstand drought.
“You do what you can,” Lupafya said as we walked from farm to farm one morning in northern Malawi in mid-March. “You keep training the farmers to train their fellow farmers.”
The vast majority of Malawians are subsistence farmers. Most have no access to electricity or cars. More than a third of the country’s children show signs of chronic malnutrition.
As we passed a school, where children were playing in the yard, I asked Lupafya if school lunches were served for free. She shook her head. Not here in the poorest villages, she said, where free lunch would be most valuable. “Whoever wears shoes continues to wear shoes. Those who don’t wear shoes will not continue to wear shoes,” she said. “Do you understand me?”
I did.
It was also an apt metaphor for global warming inequality. Those with the smallest climate footprint are hardest hit by climate hazards.
One of Lupafya’s collaborators is Rachel Bezner Kerr, a professor at Cornell who studies sustainable food systems. She has been working in Malawi for over 20 years. (The first time she came was as a graduate student and she brought a sample of Malawian manure to test in a laboratory in the United States.)
Compared to Americans, Bezner Kerr said, farmers in Malawi are trying to adapt much more aggressively.
I asked her why.
Perhaps, she guessed, because climate shocks aren’t the only shocks they’ve had to deal with. The country was colonized by Great Britain. The first prime minister and later president, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, was an authoritarian who ruled for 30 years. The AIDS epidemic took a terrible toll.
“Maybe that will help them put climate change into perspective?” she asked aloud.
Whatever the reasons, they taught the rest of us lessons. “People here can be really innovative and inspiring,” she said, “not just on an individual level, but in their collaboration with each other.”
Two days later, I was sitting on a bench in the courtyard of a coffee farmer’s house near the town of Zirobwe, in central Uganda. It was almost 6 pm. The sun turned golden orange and cast long shadows on the ground. And Margaret Nasamba was busy making her regular evening cup of coffee. Liberica excelsa in this case, picked from her family’s coffee orchard, dried in the sun, ground in a hand-turned mill.
She offered me a steaming cup. It had a nutty aroma. It landed softly on my tongue. A gift from generous strangers trying to save coffee in the age of climate chaos.
In case you missed them, our full articles from Uganda and Malawi:
What climate change could mean for the coffee you drink.
Meet Malawi’s climate hackers.
Essential news from The Times
Diesel ban in California: State regulators have approved a ban, from 2036, on the sale of new buses and trucks that run on diesel.
Climate Disinformation: Google promised to cut revenue for videos that lie about global warming. But a new report found that YouTube continued to profit from climate denial.
A storm-resistant hospital: Ten years after Hurricane Sandy flooded a Coney Island hospital, New York City built a new hospital that can withstand rising water and flying debris.
Too hot, too early in Spain: The country is facing summer temperatures weeks earlier than expected. That comes on top of a drought that has depleted reservoirs and dried up fields.
A royal gift, updated: An English city has been serving newly crowned monarchs for 800 years. But with the number of fish dwindling, a pork pie will have to suffice this time.
Marxist and Organic: The Landless Workers Movement has organized Brazil’s poor to take unused land from the rich for 40 years. It is a political force and also a major food producer.
From outside The Times
-
Yale Environment 360 interviewed Tero Mustonen, an activist leading an effort to restore 130,000 hectares of peatland in Finland. It functions.
-
Guyana has placed almost all of its forest land in a $750 million carbon credit agreement with the Hess oil company, Mongabay reported. Some experts wonder the benefits of the project.
-
From Climate Home News: Exxon is doing everything it can to recoup its investments in a fracking project in Colombia as the country prepares for prohibit that method of oil extraction.
-
European countries are buying more Russian oil refined in India and other countries, The Hindu reported. It could be Help Russia avoid economic sanctions.
-
The UN is looking for a nature-friendly indicator of economic success to replace gross domestic product. The Climate Question podcast explored what that might look like.
Before you go: kinder, gentler hydropower
A hydropower renaissance is underway, but it doesn’t require massive dams. These are systems with two reservoirs: one on top of a hill and one at the bottom. When the demand for electricity is low, water is pumped up to the higher reservoir. Later, that water can be drained from the upper reservoir to generate power as needed. It’s a simple idea that can offset weather-related declines in wind and solar power.
Correction: The Friday, April 28 newsletter incorrectly described the reasoning behind Joseff Kolman’s early career decisions. He said he was not pursuing a career in public policy because government jobs in energy and environmental policy became scarce after the 2016 election, not because wages were too low.
Thank you for being a subscriber. We’ll be back on Friday.
Manuela Andreoni, Claire O’Neill, Chris Plourde and Douglas Alteen contributed to Climate Forward. Read previous editions of the newsletter here.
If you enjoy what you read, consider recommending it to others. They can register here. Browse all of our subscriber newsletters here.
Reach us at climateforward@nytimes.com. We read every message and reply to many!