Climate Change analysis and its impacts on the agriculture sector in Madagascar

Identifier:  TDX:4487

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX4487

Authors:  Randriamarolaza, Luc Yannick Andréas

Abstract:
Madagascar is an agricultural country. It is among the most climate-vulnerable countries to climate change as agriculture is a climate-sensitive sector. Therefore, tailoring and monitoring climate change and agriculture information helps the decision-makers explore strategies to address the issues. This thesis contributes to improving the climate change and agriculture information in Madagascar based on proven and recent scientific approaches. Assessing the quality and homogenizing the climate and weather observational datasets are crucial steps to ascertain the reliability and reduce the uncertainty of the information. Calculating the climate change indices and their trends allows us to appreciate and evaluate changes. Detecting and attributing the causes of climate change helps to cope and mitigate climate change. Finally, highlighting climate change’s effects on agriculture helps to establish adaptation strategies. Using daily minimum and maximum temperatures, and precipitation over 1950-2018, most errors were detected in the maximum temperature. The homogenization approach confirms the efficiency of automatic homogenization and fills in the missing values. Changes in nighttime temperature are higher than daytime temperature. Moreover, extreme temperature events are mainly due to anthropogenic forcing according to the fingerprinting method. The total precipitation amount has decreased, and an intensified drying period has been detected in the last fifteen years. Consequently, the rainy season onset and cessation are late and early respectively. The crop calendars are disrupted. The results recommend farmers grow short-length crop cycles of rice and maize crops in the future.