Giving Compass' Take:

• Leah Penniman explains how black farmers are coping with the outsized climate impact that they experience through various climate resilience techniques. 

• How can funders work to support climate resiliency in the places where it is needed most? 

• Read more about the relationship between agriculture and climate. 

From the African continent to the Americas and across the Caribbean, communities of color are on the front lines of and disproportionately harmed by climate change. Record heat waves have caused injury and death among Latinx farmworkers and devastating hurricanes have become regular annual visitors in the Caribbean islands and coastal areas of the United States.

Sub-Saharan Africa, where Ghana is, is among the regions projected to experience the harshest impacts of climate change. "If you’re not affected by climate change today, that itself is a privilege," climate activist Andrea Manning says.

But the same communities on the frontlines of climate impact are also on the frontlines of climate solutions. A new generation of black farmers is using heritage farming practices to undo some damage brought on by decades of intense tillage by early European settlers. Their practices drove around 50 percent of the original organic matter from the soil into the sky as carbon dioxide. Agriculture continues to have a profound impact on the climate, contributing 23 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions.

Now black farmers are finding ways to capture that carbon from the air and trap it in the soil. They are employing strategies included in Paul Hawken’s "Drawdown," a guide to the 100 most substantive solutions to global warming.

One practice, silvopasture, is an indigenous system that integrates nut and fruit trees, forage and grasses to feed grazing livestock. Another, regenerative agriculture, a methodology first described by agricultural scientist and inventor George Washington Carver, involves minimal soil disturbance, the use of cover crops and crop rotation. Both systems harness plants to capture greenhouse gases. "No other mechanism known to humankind is as effective in addressing global warming as the capturing of carbon dioxide from the air through photosynthesis," Hawken says.

Read the full article about climate resilience by Leah Penniman at Civil Eats.