Extreme weather conditions and food insecurity in Tanzania: Implications for climate-responsive policy design

Increasingly severe and frequent weather events threaten the resilience of low-income households in developing countries, particularly those engaged in rain-fed agriculture. In response, a growing number of countries have adapted social programmes to provide time-limited, targeted support to households that are at high risk of falling into poverty when adverse weather conditions negatively impact livelihoods.

This paper produces evidence to inform climate-responsive social policy in Tanzania, where almost a third of households are in poverty and more than half engage in subsistence or small-scale agriculture. We link five waves of household panel data to gridded weather datasets and leverage year-to-year variation to estimate the causal effects of adverse weather conditions on household food security. We find that drought conditions, as well as temperature extremes – both hot and cold – increase food insecurity. Small-scale, non-diversified farmers are particularly vulnerable to weather extremes.

Our findings highlight the need to use both multiple measures of food security and flexible measures of weather in analyses that seek to inform climate-responsive policy, to ensure all hazardous weather events are recognised.

Available at: https://doi.org/10.55158/DEEPWP43