Never has the reality of climate change and its ramifications been so obvious around the world. Humankind is currently living in times when the reality of global climate change is unequivocal. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR6 report further depicts the veracity of climate change by highlighting historically changing patterns of precipitation and temperature across the world, amidst heightened and varied levels of vulnerability around the world. This book is planned along the increasingly complex and daunting nature of climate change. The broad scope is intentional and aims at eliciting scholarship from across the globe and from varied areas of climate change research. Thus, as varied and broad as the intentions are, so too are the book’s contents. The thirteen peer-reviewed chapters are organized into four sections. Section 1 introduces the concept of climate change and other global perspectives and trends. Section 2 focuses on climate risk, resilience, and vulnerability. Section 3 explores varied perspectives on climate risks, sensitivity, and exposure with a focus on monitoring and assessment. Finally, Section 4 explores climate change adaptation and mitigation. The multidisciplinary nature of this book will appeal to a varied readership including governments, municipal authorities, and daily grassroots users of environmental resources.

This atlas describes the West African region, its population, settlement, territories, its economy and its vulnerabilities. It analyses the developments and the ways in which West Africa is conforming to a constantly changing global environment.

Smallholder farmers cultivating in West African cities often lack access to irrigation water and may use wastewater to irrigate their fields, particularly in the dry season. Wastewater contaminates vegetables with pathogens so that local consumers are likely to be exposed to health risks. Market data on consumers' actual payments for safety improved (= pathogen reduced) vegetables are not available in West Africa as vegetables differing in safety levels are sold, due to an information deficit on the consumers' side, at a uniform market price. Certification and repeated purchase experience may reduce these information deficits. For both market signals to be effective, trust is required. This book analyses the role of trust in explaining consumers' maximum willingness to pay (WTP) for safe and certified safe food in a Hicksian framework. This theory is tested using household data (n = 2,662) generated from contingent valuation surveys undertaken in Tamale, Ouagadougou, Bamenda and Bamako. The findings show that local consumers are willing to pay substantially higher prices (+40\% to +160\%) for certified safe vegetables. They further suggest that trust in farmers and traders reduces WTP and trust in certifying institutions increases WTP for certified safe vegetables. Most WTPs were found to be construct valid. They are therefore taken as trustworthy expressions of consumers' preferences for safety improved vegetables. These results stress the need to introduce vegetable certification in West African cities.

The purpose of this book is to set out the key lessons learned and to provide recommendations and guidance based on existing cases and examples for a wide range of actors involved in urban food systems. In particular, the aim is for this publication to serve as a sourcebook for local decision-makers, policy advisors, urban planners, specialists, practitioners and others involved in urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA). The sourcebook is also for those involved in the design and implementation of production schemes, planning of urban food strategies, and policies concerning agriculture in urban and peri-urban areas.

Against the background of unprecedented rates of urbanisation in the Global South, leading to massive social, economic and environmental transformations, this book engages with the dire need to understand the ecology of such settings as the foundation for fostering sustainable and resilient human settlements in contexts that are very different to the Global North. It does so by bringing together scholars from around the world, drawing together research and case studies from across the Global South to illustrate, in an interdisciplinary and comprehensive fashion, the ecology of towns and cities in the Global South. Framed using a social-ecological systems lens, it provides the reader with an in-depth analysis and understanding of the ecological dynamics and ecosystem services and disservices within the complex and rapidly changing towns and cities of the Global South, a region with currently scarce representation in most of the urban ecology literature. As such the book makes a call for greater geographical balance in urban ecology research leading towards a more global understanding and frameworks. The book embraces the complexity of these rapid transformations for ecological and environmental management and how the ecosystems and the benefits they provide shape local ecologies, livelihood opportunities and human wellbeing, and how such knowledge can be mobilised towards improved urban design and management and thus urban sustainability.

With the population of West Africa set to double by 2050, this book explores how agricultural production systems and policy will have to change to support this growth.