Blogs

par Sonja Vermeulen

Dix à vingt ans c’est le délai typiquement nécessaire à la conception et la mise en œuvre de la plupart des interventions essentielles à l'agriculture: le développement de nouvelles variétés de cultures, les infrastructures d’irrigation ou de stockage d’eau à l’échelle de bassins versants, ou encore l'implantation et création de nouveau grands centres de traitement. La bonne conception de n’importe laquelle de ces interventions dépend d’une bonne connaissance du climat attendu une fois qu'elles seront en place et en fonctionnement. Les planificateurs et décideurs ont besoin d’avoir, à une ou deux décennies d'avance, des prévisions météorologiques locales fiables pour des variables clés telles que la variabilité interannuelle des précipitations ou la durée de la saison de croissance. 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 »

by Ousmane Ndiaye and Robert Zougmoré   

Seasonal climate forecasts could have considerable potential to improve agricultural management and livelihoods for smallholder farmers. But constraints related to legitimacy, salience, access, understanding, capacity to respond and data scarcities have so far limited the widespread use and benefit from seasonal predictions in the Sahel region. The existing constraints reflect inadequate information services, policies or institutional process in the region, however there are great potential in overcoming them. One trend is that regional climate outlook forums and national meteorological services have been at the forefront to provide forecast information for agriculture to rural farmers. One example of this is the communication workshop on probabilistic seasonal climate forecast, held in Senegal last year and supported  by CCAFS. As part of the work on providing farmers with forecasts, a follow up workshop was held in late January to see how farmers used the information in their agricultural practices and what needs to be further improved. Read more »