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A targeted approach, with scientists working directly with policy-makers and smallholders finding solutions to agriculture and climate related issues, could be the key to scaling-up climate-smart farming. This is exactly what the Policy Action for Climate Change (PACCA) project, led by the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA), is aiming for.

The four-year climate project is part of CCAFS Flagship on “Policies and Institutions for Climate-Resilient Food Systems” and has already launched two major Learning Alliances in Uganda and Tanzania.

The Alliance participants include government members, scientists, community-based organizations, private sector representatives and farmers’ associations, who share and present interdisciplinary agriculture and climate change research, knowledge, solutions, and experiences.

The approach is to make the meetings as appealing and understandable as possible, so that when people leave, they know which policy actions and climate-smart farm practices are available and useful to adopt.

As part of the engagement activities, the PACCA team is working directly with policy-makers in Uganda and Tanzania to, among many things, support the development of national-level policy frameworks, ensuring climate change and climate-smart agriculture are taken into consideration.

Watch Project Coordinator Edidah Ampaire talk about the PACCA project, who the team is working with and main challenges faced so far:

Testing policies against future socio-economic scenarios

By striking up collaboration with CCAFS Future Scenarios team, the PACCA project invited stakeholders to review the National Agriculture Policy and Mechanization Framework in Uganda as well as the new National Environment Policy in Tanzania, testing made assumptions and policies against multiple, all highly potential scenarios for the two countries. The scenarios are used as a ‘crash test’ to make the policy frameworks more climate-sensitive and robust.

In mid-February participants came for two consecutive national workshops in Tanzania and Uganda. The stakeholders represented the Vice President’s Office, Prime Minister’s Office, and Ministry of Agriculture, of Livestock and Fisheries Development in Tanzania and in Uganda, the Ministry of Water and Environment and Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries.

Review full list of participants: Uganda and Tanzania

The scenario workshops were conducted the same way as in Cambodia, Honduras and Bangladesh, and were done in collaboration with University of Oxford, started off with critically reviewing the existing policy frameworks, coming up with a list of recommendations where they could be further strengthened.

The participants were then introduced to the “scenario worlds”, worlds were the sleepy lions, lone leopards, industrious ants and herds of zebras live. These worlds, or potential scenarios, have been pre-crafted by the scenarios team, based on previous work in East Africa back in 2012.

They combined the scenario storylines of socioeconomic development with climate change scenarios and quantified them for the region using the GLOBIOM model, developed by International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the IMPACT model, developed by International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Providing participants with model outputs, such as figures of per capita calorie availability as well as growth in crop yields for each scenario, builds additional context for the plausible future worlds and allows participants to examine the relative differences between scenarios.

The sleeping lions world illustrates a world with latent capacity and wasted opportunities, with revolutions that lead nowhere, due to lack of regional integration and a reactive government. In world where lone leopards live there is a lot of selfishness. There is still no regional integration, but a proactive government.

Things are looking better in the world according to the industrious ants. High regional integration and a proactive government create a wide range of benefits for food security, even though it is a costly battle that has to deal with corruption. In this scenario there is regional integration, but a reactive mode of governance focussing on industry, tourism, export agriculture, and the likes. There is little emphasis on food security, environment and livelihoods.

What will a world dominated by a "herd of zebras" look like? Testing policies against various socio-economic scenarios can help create more robust policy frameworks. Photo: E. van de Grift 

Entering these worlds enables participants to see if their policies will be effective under different socio-economic scenarios and if they are robust enough to withstand outlined challenges.

After the first workshop was held, PACCA Project Leader Edidah Ampaire said: “I am happy to see that after only two days of scenario development, stakeholders were critically reviewing every section of their framework, coming up with multiple improvements and recommendations.”

“I think we made significant progress towards shaping more flexible and climate-responsive policies,” she continued.

Fredrick Ssozi, Assistant Commissioner on agricultural mechanization from the Ministry of Agriculture, Animals, Industry and Fishery in Uganda commented:  

“This exercise has been a real eye-opener. In the beginning I wasn’t sure where we were going with all of these different worlds, but once I got it, I saw how useful they were to further strengthen the framework.”

“We should perhaps have invited many more stakeholders to the workshop, and also made sure to include our other departments! This would help ensure planning is long-term and incorporate more uncertainty into our work,” he added.

In the photo: Policy-makers from Tanzania came together for a workshop focused on scenario-guided policy development in the context of climate change. Photo: E. van de Grift

Next steps

The ministries are currently revising their Development Strategy and Investment Plan together with the PACCA team, using the scenario-based recommendations to further improve the ministries’ new policies. The two teams will closely collaborate with the policy-makers to update the policy frameworks in accordance with the scenario-based recommendations

For the PACCA team, the scenario follow-ups will be done in parallel with all other project activities. Gathering stakeholders from various communities, cconducting field-research and engaging with smallholders, and strengthening collaboration with key policy-makers across ministries are all key activities for the project team.

Want to learn more or get in touch? Contact PACCA Project Coordinator Edidah Ampaire (e.ampaire@cgiar.org)

Related Reading:

- Policy Action on Climate Change project launched in Tanzania
- Creating future scenarios to review policies in Uganda and Tanzania
- All Future Scenario blogs

View more photos from the workshops:
- Scenario-guided policy development in Tanzania
- Scenario-guided policy development in Uganda