Drought versus flood: What matters more to the performance of Sahel farming systems?

Abstract

AbstractRecent climate change has brought new patterns of extreme events in terms of both drought and heavy rainfall to the drought‐prone African Sahel. The effects of these recent extreme events on the performance of the Sahel farming systems are still weakly investigated. This study aims at assessing effects of droughts versus floods on crop yield levels and losses, focusing on the so‐called recovery period, particularly 2001–2020. A newly developed productivity‐drought condition index (PDCI) is utilized to assess agricultural productivity as related to drought or flood in a highly vulnerable region, that is, the Sudanese Sahel. Four farming systems, namely traditional rainfed, mechanized rainfed, gravity irrigated and spate irrigated systems, with sorghum and millet as staple food crops, are considered. The PDCI is defined as a function of the integrated normalized difference vegetation index (iNDVI) over the growing season. To address temporal and spatial variabilities, scaling of the PDCI is done in two dimensions: space and time. Crop statistics are used to derive yield losses. Our results show that both drought and flood episodes (seven and six episodes, respectively) can be captured using the PDCI. Drought remains the most relevant risk to Sahel's crop productivity. Some recent large‐scale floods led to yield loss. However, floods cause smaller risks to agricultural productivity compared to droughts. Floods may even result in enhanced crop yields. Based upon scaling in the time or space domain, ranking the severity of drought impacts on crop yield for individual years from 2001 to 2020 reveals least to slightly different results. Vulnerability to drought depends on the crop type and farming system. Drought effect on crop yield from the irrigated sector is clear on individual years but not as a general statistical relationship. The parameter ‘percentage area under drought’ explains around one‐third of the variation in the rainfed crop yield. The spate irrigation scheme, the gravity irrigated system and the rainfed farmlands experienced respectively 87%, 57% and 46% of area under drought on average. Irrigated systems produce much higher crop yields than rainfed systems. The mechanized system is more drought‐vulnerable than the traditional system. These results call for identifying agricultural management pathways that recognize the combined implications of both hydrological extremes for the region's food security.