Forecasting Climate Change Pattern for Bolero Agriculture Extension Planning Area in Malawi

Abstract

Bolero community in Malawi, like most rural communities in Sub-Saharan Africa, is very vulnerable to climate variability and change because of its reliance on local biological diversity, ecosystem services, cultural and religious landscapes as source of sustenance and well-being. For this reason, a study was conducted to forecast climate change pattern for Bolero Agriculture Extension Planning Area based on temperature data from 1982 to 2013 in order to inform the policy makers and community on the future prospects of climate change and its effects. The data was collected by Malawi Government Department of Meteorology and Climate Change at Bolero weather station using fixed temperature recording thermometer. The study used Univariate Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average to model and forecast temperature variability. Based on ARIMA and its components autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation functions, Normalized Bayesian Information Criterion, Box-Ljung Q statistics and residuals estimated, ARIMA (1,1,3) was selected for the maximum temperature data which helped in explaining the temperature time series and forecasting the future values. From the forecast available from the fitted ARIMA model, it is concluded that forecasted maximum temperature will increase by 1.6°C from 27.7°C in 1982 to 29.3°C in 2030. The temperature increase suggests that climate change could continue to negatively impact on agricultural livelihood options in Bolero community and this call for increased adaptive capacity for the community.