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Add to Preferred SourcesThe Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) have held the inception workshop for a new project that aims to buttress the capacities of smallholder farmers in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda to adapt and be more resilient to the weather variability and climate change.
With USD 6.8 million funding from the Adaptation Fund, the three-year program called, “Agricultural Climate Resilience Enhancement Initiative (ACREI),” will develop the capacities of pastoral and agro-pastoral communities, who are extremely vulnerable to weather variability and climate change, to understand and appropriately use climate information to be more resilient to the negative impacts of climate change.
Speaking at the project inception workshop, Guleid Artan, Director of IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC), said that weather-related challenges and hazards severely impact on the quantity and quality of food; and thus, pose negative impacts on the livelihoods of farmers and their dependents. Pastoral and agro-pastoral communities in the Horn of Africa, are extremely vulnerable to weather variability and climate change, where they experience droughts and floods more frequently in recent years. The risk of losing their livelihood assets due to climatic risks has been real. Enhancing the technical and financial capacities of these communities to cope and adapt to climate change and variability is thus crucial for their survival.
Cyril Ferrand, Resilience Team Leader at FAO Sub-regional Office for Eastern Africa, raised concern over increasing loss of agricultural production to drought.
He remarked, “Drought affects the agriculture sector disproportionately, relative to other sectors. Over 80 percent of all damage and loss caused by drought is absorbed by agriculture, causing food insecurity and pushing malnutrition on a reversal trend”.
Hence, a pragmatic action is crucially needed to build capacities of stallholder farmers against climatic shocks, to advance sustainable agricultural production.
“We are eager to be linking climate information to the local level in order to build resilience and support adaptation in the agricultural sector,” said Robert Stefanski, Chief Agricultural Meteorology Division at WMO.
He further noted that the partnership among WMO, FAO and ICPAC will be very crucial in building resilience in the targeted countries.
Original source: WMO
Published on 5 September 2018