Training on using climate scenarios and analogues for designing adaptation strategies in East Africa
The CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) East Africa regional office will hold a one-week training workshop on “Using Climate Scenarios and Analogues for Designing Adaptation Strategies in East Africa”. Climate change and climate variability pose threats to agriculture and food security in East Africa and add to the region’s development challenges of reducing poverty and hunger. Moreover, agricultural production in East Africa is mainly rain-fed and thus highly vulnerable to climate variability. The importance of agriculture to economic growth and rural livelihoods, and its vulnerability to climate change underscores the importance of building resilience to climate change in East Africa.
The CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) East Africa regional office will hold a one-week training workshop on “Using Climate Scenarios and Analogues for Designing Adaptation Strategies in East Africa”. Climate change and climate variability pose threats to agriculture and food security in East Africa and add to the region’s development challenges of reducing poverty and hunger. Moreover, agricultural production in East Africa is mainly rain-fed and thus highly vulnerable to climate variability. The importance of agriculture to economic growth and rural livelihoods, and its vulnerability to climate change underscores the importance of building resilience to climate change in East Africa.
The objective of the training is to build regional capacity on the use of climate scenarios and analogues for designing adaptation options, and provide an overview of climate modeling techniques and tools. The analogues tool developed by CCAFS will help researchers and other stakeholders in agriculture and food security in East Africa to identify and map sites which have statistically similar climates (‘analogous’) across space and/or time. The analogues tool complements top-down global climatic models and scenarios science. It can allow a user to target and map field-trial sites across the globe, obtain site information and its possible climate futures. This information can be used to design adaptation strategies in agriculture. During the workshop, participants will be introduced to the online platform of the analogues tool.
Workshop participants will be drawn from various National Agricultural Research and Extension Services (NARES), National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHS), universities, and other key partners from Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda .
The anticipated workshop outputs are:
- Capacity built among regional partners and CCAFS East Africa team on use of the analogues tool;
- Enhanced capacity of regional partners to use climate scenarios and analogues to design adaptation strategies in agriculture; and
- Explore opportunities for farmer-to-farmer exchange visits to enhance adaptation learning and improve adaptive capacity of communities in the region.