Cecilia's blog

Global hunger and undernutrition could be worsened by climate change

Submitted by Cecilia on 13th March 2013
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Globally, almost one in three children grows up lacking necessary nutrients

Co-written by Irish Deputy Prime Minister Eamon Gilmore; Mary Robinson, president of the Mary Robinson Foundation Climate Justice; Ertharin Cousin, executive director of the World Food Programme; and Frank Rijsberman, CEO, CGIAR Consortium.

Join the discussion on Twitter: #HNCJ

"Imagine a world where too much rain, or too little, means the difference between a life fulfilled and a life blighted by hunger and poor nutrition.  Imagine, for a brief moment, measuring your children’s chance of survival by the number of bags of grain you harvest or against a dwindling stock of rice.

This is the reality for millions of vulnerable communities. Today, almost one billion people suffer from hunger, most of them women and children. Globally, almost one in three children grows up lacking the nutrients they need to fend off disease and to develop to their full potential. 

And now, climate change is exacerbating the hardships they face daily.  Read more »

Blind vegetable farming: One calabash at a time

Submitted by Cecilia on 11th March 2013
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by Yemi Ademiluyi

I tagged along with Jessica Thorn when she went out into the field in search of dry season farms. Jessica, a researcher from Oxford University, is working on mapping project sites in Lawra-Jirapa in Northern Ghana as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).

In the field Jess is using a combination of quantitative ecological field-testing techniques with qualitative sociological methods. These surveys are used to assess the relationship between ecosystem processes, goods, services and human well being in a changing climate. Read more »

Farmers become citizen scientists: Testing wheat crops for climate change adaptation

Submitted by Cecilia on 11th March 2013
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A series of Bioversity International projects looks at people's need for seeds

by Jacob van Etten

“So we pulled out the radishes!” We are standing next to a plot with three different wheat varieties in a CCAFS-led Climate-Smart Village in Vaishali district, India. Farmers here are testing out wheat varieties we supplied to them through a climate change adaptation project. “The wheat seeds arrived late, but we still wanted to test them. So we made the space.”

During our visit to Vaishali, it was clear that farmers liked the new wheat varieties. Read more »

Equal access to climate information between men and women farmers? Study suggests no

Submitted by Cecilia on 7th March 2013
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Listening to women in an agricultural context is crucial for climate adaptation

by Cecilia Schubert

A recent article by the New York Times reminds us that women in developing countries are increasingly left behind to sustain family farms,  as the men migrate to cities in search for work. But discrimination, gender stereotypes and women’s low social status limit their access to fertilizer, seeds, credit, technical assistance and membership in cooperatives and unions. Therefore, there is a great risk that any adaptative response to communities affected by climate change is not complete if gender is not considered.

The need for a gender-focus in adaptation work was also discussed in one of our more recent Working Papers, “Using a gender lens to explore farmers’ adaptation options in the face of climate change” originating from the researchers investigating gender in the context of climate change, food security and agriculture.

Getting to grips with gender in a food and farming context Read more »

Participatory videos in Nepal: Voicing women’s perceptions on climate change

Submitted by Cecilia on 7th March 2013
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Video project in Nepal showcasing women's reality dealing with climate change

by Floriane Clement

International climate change debates are often based upon simplistic assumptions of how men and women perceive and address risks and uncertainty. For instance, women are commonly portrayed as a homogenous group who are always more vulnerable than men to climate change simply because they are women. Yet the relationship between gender, poverty and vulnerability is neither straightforward, nor universal (Arora-Jonsson, 2011).

Just to illustrate, in some areas of Nepal it was found that poor women from landless households are more likely to attend community meetings and speak up because they feel less constrained by social norms than women from higher class and caste (Agarwal, 2010). They have therefore a higher capability to influence community decisions that might affect their vulnerability. Read more »

High-resolution satellites could improve crop yield forecasts

Submitted by Cecilia on 4th March 2013
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armer can obtain more accurate yield forecastings if using satellite imagery.

by Wilco Terink, Futurewater

Crop growth models play a major role in sustaining the world-wide food security. These models are used to simulate crop growth during the growing season, and the final crop yield at the end of the growing season, given the farmers’ management practices. At a more strategic level, these crop growth models play an important role to decision makers to take timely decisions regarding food import and export strategies.

The simulation accuracy of crop growth models relies on the quality of the input data. Since crop yield forecasting applications are often applied over large areas that rely on a spatially distributed crop growth model, the uncertainty in the spatial variation of the input data increases. Read more »

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