Climate change, private sector and value chains : constraints and adaptation strategies working paper

This work was carried out under the Collaborative Adaptation Research Inititive in Africa and Asia (CARIAA), with financial support from the UK Government's Department for International Development and the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.Understanding how climate change will affect private sector activities and incentives as well as markets is key to understanding the overall economic but also social and environmental impacts of climate change in arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs). The private sector and market work package fosuses on private sector actors as key agents of change, with "private sector" actors defined here in a broad sense, encompassing both smallhoder farmers and large multinational companies. Although those actors are heterogeneous and sometimes have very different rationalities, the core constraints (such as limited access to finance, markets or natural resources) influencing their decision-making are often similar. Moreover, these actors are not acting independently from each other; they interact direclty or indirectly within value chains or through the use of resources and assets. For instance, they compete on the use of labour, land and water