By Somini Sengupta, The New York Times
NEW YORK - As a climate journalist, I get asked a perennial question by my fellow Americans: What do I do in the face of a crisis so big and complicated?
The answer I witnessed on a recent reporting trip to East and Southern Africa: everything.
In Malawi, subsistence farmers are resurrecting old crops, planting trees to nourish their soils, sharing manure with their neighbors, experimenting with different sowing techniques, all in an effort to cope with the droughts, floods and cyclones hitting them left and right.
In Uganda, coffee farmers are beginning to switch away from robusta, the coffee species they’ve grown and shipped abroad for decades but that is falling prey to droughts and diseases aggravated by climate change.
Instead, they’re growing a totally different and tougher coffee called excelsa, a variety of the native species Liberica.
In both countries, I was struck by how aggressively people were adapting. They were creative, they were pragmatic.
They put one foot in front of the other and kept going. They were trying to be less poor, because being less poor is the best way to be more resilient to climate shocks.
