5. Conclusions and policy recommendations

Climatic hazards have complex and overlapping outcomes in semi-arid environment in Tanzania. They have negative impact on natural, social, financial, physical and human capitals that are critical for community livelihoods. The trends of the hazards had increased over time, in the previous 30 years, concurrently with famine and disturbances on communities' livelihoods. Communities, men and women, had differently adopted coping and adaptation measures in dealing with vulnerability. Men's strategies took place outside the home while women's strategies were mainly conducted at home. The major coping and adaptation strategies for men were related to mobility. Interestingly, women's adaptation and coping strategies were not reliable and sustainable such that they were not effectively working resulting into more vulnerability among women relative to men counterparts. These results have policy implications calling concerted efforts from development actors to address the situation. To that effect, the chapter recommends the following:

• Development programmes implemented by different stakeholders like the central and local governments should make sure that women are given skills and involved in environmental management interventions like tree planting, water projects and soil moisture and fertility conservation because they are main users and agents of environmental management. This can rehabilitate the degraded land to improve food security. It can also restore availability of firewood to women's proximity that in turn reduces gender vulnerability.

