CIAT

Edited by Lucy Holt

Irregular climatic variations are a major problem for agricultural production. However, knowledge on weather patterns can allow for the development of seasonal management strategies that account for weather patterns, even as they oscillate. Ultimately, this helps to secure farmers livelihoods.

There are many ways of producing this knowledge. In Senegal, the CGIAR Research Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) has paired local farmers with meteorologists to show the combination of indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge can equal more than the sum of its parts.

Now, in the Andes, CCAFS has teamed up with International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), Brazil, and Colombia´s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MADR), to found the project: Seasonal climate forecasts for agricultural crop and risk management. Read more »

by Anton Eitzinger (CIAT)

During the month of November last year, several researchers from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) implemented participatory action research in four of the CCAFS East Africa sites. The participatory research was part of a multi-disciplinary project that aims to combine data on inherent soil properties, as well as ecological and land degradation status of the sites (see Land Degradation Surveillance Framework LDSF) into the development of robust crop suitability and prediction models. Socio-economic data including gender disaggregated data collected from the CCAFS household baseline survey (get data here), supplemented by a questionnaire survey carried out through local partners, will be analyzed to better understand the constraints and opportunities for adaptation. Read more »

by Chase Sova

Understanding the cost associated with climate change adaptation interventions in agriculture is important for mobilizing support and providing timely resources to improve resilience and adaptive capacities of small scale producers.  In the latest CGIAR Climate working paper, Community-Based Adaptation Costing: An integrated framework for the participatory costing of community-based adaptations to climate change in agriculture (PDF), we see that the economic analysis of climate interventions is more than a game of numbers.  Read more »

Written by Chase Sova

Putting agriculture in the climate change agenda has raised a number of important issues such as threats of trade barriers, diversion of REDD+ funds to agriculture, how to deal with its cross-cutting and complex nature, and the links between agricultural mitigation and adaptation. Many of these issues have already become central talking points in UNFCCC negotiations (read David Howlett’s related analysis on “Political Economy and Food Security” for more information). However, it is worth remembering that these issues have much broader relevance to the ability to produce feasible adaptation and mitigation solutions in agriculture.  

Irrespective of where we are in the process of embedding agriculture into efforts to fight climate change (be it at the negotiating table in Durban or a subsistence farming community in Western Kenya), we must address issues of scalability, the adaptation-mitigation interface, equity in carbon payments, and agriculture’s cross-sectoral nature, in order to ensure climate measures are most effective.

This post looks more closely at one of these issues; namely scalability, or a system's capacity to adapt to changes in size and complexity. Read more »