Mali is extremely vulnerable to climate change and the country is already facing acute climate-related challenges from higher temperatures and more frequent extreme weather events. The impact of climate change has also contributed to a rise in food insecurity, with almost a quarter of the population expected to be either facing food insecurity or at risk of doing so by mid-2023. That is already having a hugely damaging effect on Mali’s economy and action is needed without delay to avoid a further increase in food insecurity.

'The book's radical message "save livelihoods not just lives" should be on the desk of every policy-maker concerned with relief and development and demands a rethink of policy and practice across the board.' - Robert Chambers, Institute of Development Studies 'A book on development I really enjoyed. An entriguing story emerges: the real expert on saving lives and livelihoods are the people facing famine and insecurity themselves. This book details the evolution of the local food monitoring system, showing that by concentrating on what people can do in response to change, rather than what they cannot do, we can devise more permanent and effective responses to food insecurity than emergency food aid distribution.' - Mike Aaronson, Save the Children Poor people living in high-risk environments live continuously with uncertainty which often threatens their livelihoods. They have therefore developed effective means of predicting and responding to large fluctuations in rainfall, harvest levels and natural resource production. These methods of prediction and response often out-perform conventional early warning systems promoted by donors and governments, and yet are rarely considered in the conception and implementation of food security programmes.

Mali is expected to be profoundly impacted by climate change. Its mid-century temperature could increase by 2°C, which could have detrimental impacts on crop production. Besides, northern Mali is currently highly arid is not suitable for agriculture. The South has the responsibility to feed the national population. However, the region is experiencing rapid population growth. Mali is likely to struggle to feed its growing population under climate change. Food production and food security in the South have a wider influence on the national food supply. Food security lies at the interface of biophysical, climatic, and socio-economic systems and demands a systemic approach for evaluation. Using a biophysical crop model with an agent-based model of household food systems, we capture the dynamics within and across multiple associated systems. We focus in the South and use multidisciplinary tools to explore the trajectories of household food security under climate change and population growth in the region.The dissertation is organized into three research papers. Paper 1, entitled "A Largely Unsupervised Domain-Independent Qualitative Data Extraction Approach for Empirical Agent-based Model Development.", focuses on exploring household food systems and identifying actors of household food security and their behaviors. Chiefly, we aim to extract the information needed to develop an ABM of household food systems. We apply largely automatic efficient approaches for information extraction from contextually rich qualitative field narratives. Using a combination of semantics and syntactic Natural Language Processing, we identify actors (agents) of household food security, their properties, and actions and interactions responsible for household food supply. The data extraction is primarily unsupervised and, apart from being efficient, it controls manual manipulation and bias introduction in the model development. We use the extracted information for developing a contextual model of household food security. Finally, we subject the model to stakeholder evaluation for credibility and validity.Paper 2, entitled "Analyzing household vulnerability to food insecurity in rural southern Mali - a coupled biophysical and social model approach", combines a biophysical process-based crop model with an ABM of household food system to analyze household vulnerability to food insecurity in southern Mali. We use the Systems Approach to Land Use Sustainability (SALUS) as the crop model to simulate the cultivation of maize, millet, and sorghum in the region. While SALUS provides information on food production, ABM simulates interactions for food access. We measure household vulnerability using Food Security Vulnerability Index (FSVI), a coping-based index, that evaluates households' vulnerability to food insecurity by assessing the mechanisms used by the households to address household food scarcity. Running a business-as-usual scenario, defined by low access to input, high population growth, and a high emission climate change scenario at Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 level, we find that maize and sorghum lose their productivity significantly under future climate change. Besides, the region sees a significant increase in its food insecure population. Around 80% of the regional households are at risk of food insecurity by mid-century. In paper 3, entitled "Global or Local? Effects of policy interventions on household food security in Koutiala, southern Mali: A coupled biophysical and social systems approach", we evaluate the effectiveness of selected global and local level policy intervention in promoting household food security in the South. The model recommends local level interventions that include improved access to input and lower population growth for a prompt and significant increase in food security in the region. More than 60% of the regional households could be food secure under the combinations of the interventions. However, the global level intervention that consists of lowering emission to RCP4.5 level does not have significant impacts on local household food production and food security.

In a changing Mali facing climate challenges, " Climate Threat, Malian Food " offers a hopeful path towards food security. This book explores the potential of underutilized crops that thrive in harsh environments. You'll discover a range of drought-resistant, heat-tolerant options like fonio, moringa, and indigenous legumes. These forgotten crops hold immense promise for diversifying diets and boosting Mali's agricultural resilience. " Climate Threat, Malian Food " goes beyond simply listing these crops. It delves into their nutritional value, cultivation techniques, and potential economic benefits for farmers. The book also explores the challenges of integrating these crops into existing agricultural practices.

Between the 1960s and 1980s, a series of abrupt, 'unprecedented' droughts occurred in the Sahel region of Sub Saharan Africa which created a regime shift in the Sahel where the socio-ecological and livelihood systems transitioned from a high resilience/low sensitivity to a low resilience /high sensitivity state. Mali, a landlocked country in sub-Saharan Africa, experienced dramatic impacts on food security and social, environmental, and institutional systems triggered by the droughts. As a result, Malian agriculture underwent significant transformations initiated by the cereal liberalization policies in the 1990s. Cereal production almost doubled in the early 2000s, yet the number of people facing chronic and persistent food insecurity and malnutrition has been steadily increasing in the past decade and may continue to rise in the context of current climate projections for a drier and hotter Sahel. This dissertation undertakes a closer investigation, beyond production, on the structural root causes and socio-ecological processes of food security and climate resilience in Mali using a mixed-method approach of process tracing, participatory game design, causal loop mapping, and system dynamics modeling. Paper 1, titled "The Malian Past: A historical analysis of the adaptive cycles in Malian socio-ecological systems", outlines the main environmental, social and institutional changes in Mali from 1960 to 2017 and situates these changes within the adaptive cycle framework. The paper challenges the existing narrative of Mali as a region that transitioned from a high resilience state to a low resilience state and suggests that Mali exhibited stages of high resilience during the collapse, reorganization and growth stages that followed the drought period in the 1960s and beyond. Paper 2 titled "The Malian Present: A participatory game design approach to examine causal pathways of Barriers and opportunities for food security and climate adaptation in Southern Mali" explores the current barriers of food security and climate adaptation faced by rural farming households in Southern Mali The paper elucidates on the development and implementation of the 'Food and Farm' game that was used as a tool to assess farming decision making under climate uncertainty. Using causal loop diagramming, this paper identifies unavailability of formal credit sources especially for non-cotton and female farmers; inadequate access to crop inputs; inadequate land access and user rights for female farmers; unavailability of adequate water; low soil fertility; climate risks and cost of early maturing varieties as the key barriers in agricultural adaptation. Paper 3 titled "The Malian Future: System Dynamics Modelling of Resilience of Malian Agriculture as a Socioecological System" discusses the results from a system dynamics model that performs a series of future climate and adaptation scenario analyses to assess the scope of future resilience of agricultural systems in Mali. The model suggests that the key drivers influencing food security in Mali are change in temperature during sowing phase which influences crop yields as well as rainfall patterns in growing season. Further increase in global temperatures and interdecadal fluctuations in rainfall patterns in crop growing phase will likely lead Mali to another famine and food insecurity phase by 2030. Adaptation strategies such as enhanced crop management, land-use change, stabilization of internal migration and urbanization rates and cereal land expansion will, at best, help in delaying the effects of declining food security as projected for 2025-2060. This dissertation recommends Malian policy-makers to move beyond incremental adaptation support and enhance preparedness for future food insecurity through systemic transformations in land rights and land use, especially among female farmers in Mali and support the cultivation of climate-resilient crops such as sorghum and millet as opposed to maize and rice.