In recent times, the effects of climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic and other natural disasters have undermined global efforts to reduce poverty and inequality among rural farmers. While efforts at mitigating the impacts of climate change, particularly in developing countries, have not yielded significant improvements, the global health crises of the COVID-19 pandemic have, in many ways, undermined the positive adaptations to climate change. Based on data produced through mixed methods, the paper explores how COVID-19 affected farmers’ ability to adapt to the changing climatic conditions in Ghana’s Coastal and Guinea savannah ecological zones. The paper argues that the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has undermined farmers’ access to markets, knowledge, innovations, technologies and critical inputs such as fertilisers, seeds and weedicides/herbicides/pesticides. This has decreased farm output, increased post-harvest loss and increased farmers’ vulnerability to the adverse effects of climate change.

Why is exposure to political violence associated with both mobilising and demobilising outcomes? Community dynamics influence the local materialisation of violence engendered by supra-local political conflict. The reification of the driving political conflict as intracommunal or intergroup produces disparate outcomes. Exposure to violence may generate an enduring rift concretised through intimate bloodshed or could fashion a shared victimisation experience viable as a collective political mobilisation resource. In Cameroon, the Union des populations du Cameroun (UPC) opposed French colonialism through political action and guerilla warfare. Many saw the UPC as a heroic nationalist movement, others as murderers. Through interviews, I examine narratives that [re]construct social and political meaning out of conflict and death. These narratives of conflict are used to mobilise in places where the UPC was locally hegemonic and demobilise in politically competitive areas.