Livelihood resilience and adaptation to climate variability in post-conflict South Sudan-A review

In post-conflict South Sudan, as in many other places, climate variability extreme events are already undermining communities’ livelihoods by causing adverse socioeconomic and environmental impacts. However, few studies have paid little attention to the extent to which climatic shocks have disturbed the community’s livelihood and resilience strategies built by communities. Quantitative methodological review using a systematic protocol to select scientific literature was employed. A total of twenty-five articles were extracted and analyzed. The findings indicated that climatic shocks such as flood, drought, have resulted in disruptive changes in cropping pattern, reduction in the crop production, erosion of social assets, exacerbate resource-based conflicts, resulting in large losses of livestock and disturbed the physical topography of the area leading to extinction of flora and fauna that constituted the livelihoods of the communities. Results also showed that: (1) crop farming and livestock rearing, (2) diversification of livelihood assets and, (3) switching to alternative off-farm businesses are pursued by households. This review paper recommends that policymakers should focus on building livelihood assets and investing in and outside the agriculture sector in order to promote sustainable livelihoods development and income diversification while providing pathways for communities to recover and adapt to climate variability.