Dhanush Dinesh, Global Policy Engagement Manager

Jim Hansen, CCAFS Flagship 2 Leader, IRI

Scaling up climate services for farmers: challenges and opportunities

Photo: N. Palmer (CIAT)

CCAFS is a collaboration among all 15 CGIAR Centers, led by the

International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). The program’s

overall objective is:

Catalyzing positive change towards...

• Climate-smart agriculture (CSA)

• Climate-smart food systems

• Climate-smart landscapes

...in order to

• Reduce poverty

• Improve food and nutrition security for health

• Improve natural resource systems and ecosystem services

About CCAFS

Partnerships and capacity for scaling CSA

Flagship Program 1 Flagship Program 2 Flagship Program 3 Flagship Program 4

Climate-smart agriculture, gender and social inclusion

Flagship Programs

What will it take for climate services to impact agriculture – at scale? 5 challenges:

1. Gaps in farmers’ capacity to access, understand and act on climate information

2. NMS capacity to routinely provide tailored local information

3. Gaps in historic data

4. Bringing users’ voice into co-production of services

5. Institutional, governance arrangements to sustain co-production of services

Challenge #1: Farmers’ capacity to access, understand and act on climate information

Building capacity to communicate, understand, act on information

• Processes that combine communication and capacity-building

• Participatory processes for understanding climate variability and trends, pre-season planning

• ICT for short-lead weather forecasts and advisories

• Media for weather information and advisories, awareness

• Women, other disadvantaged groups need special attention

Challenge #2: NMS capacity to routinely provide tailored local information

Challenge #3: Gaps in historic data

Supporting NMS to provide actionable local climate information

• NMS capacity challenges:

Parent ministry mandate

Human and financial resources

Cost of responding to user requests

Gaps in historic observations

• ENACTS approach

Capacity of African NMS to overcome data quality, availability and access challenges, and support stakeholder engagement and use

Combine station observations and proxies (satellite and reanalysis) to fill spatial and temporal gaps

Produce suites of derived climate information products

Disseminate information through online “Maprooms”

Challenge #4: Bringing users’ voice into co-production of services

What we think is still missing: Exploring an iterative co-design process

• Goal of developing agricultural climate services nationally led to a top-down approach

• Iterative process to capture growing farmer demand

• Climate service governance could

formalize collection of farmer

feedback, incorporate into annual

planning.

Challenge #5: Institutional and governance arrangements to sustain co-production

Preliminary thoughts about Climate Service Governance and Institutional Arrangements

• Limitations of supply-driven climate services

• Expand the boundary to agricultural research and development

• Expand the boundaries to give farmers an effective voice

CLIMATE SERVICE

NMS

(climate)

Co-owner

(farmer)

NARES

(agriculture)PARTNERSHIP

Conclusions and opportunities for private sector engagement

• Delivery of demand driven climate services

• Capacity building for value chain stakeholders

• Tap into agricultural research and development efforts

• Expand the boundaries to give farmers an effective voice

• Iterative processes to ensure that user feedback and evaluation

results are incorporated into improved services

• Climate services most effective when partnerships span generation,

translation, communication, application

www.ccafs.cgiar.org

Thank you