Suchergebnisse

Climate impacts pose enormous challenges to agricultural productivity and exert pressure on its profitability by increasing the riskiness of farmers' decisions. Climate risk is a significant barrier to adopting improved farming practices and production inputs, especially for relatively poor smallholder farmers in risk-prone environments. Climate risk also leads to uncertainty in the decision-making of other actors in the food system, including agricultural value chains, rural financial services, government planning, and humanitarian and government organizations responsible for disaster management. Thus, advances in climate science and improved availability of locally relevant climate data and information products can expand potential options for understanding, anticipating, and managing climate-related risks in the agricultural sector. Although the impact of climate-related risks has many facets in agriculture and the food system, the understanding and use of practical tools to manage climate risks are not well integrated into university-level curricula. This has led to Ethiopian public universities' engagement to advance skill-based climate curriculum through continuous consultation. The first proposed curriculum is a three-week customized training for Staff, M.Sc. students, and Ph.D. students. By developing staff and students' practical skills, this curriculum plans to integrate CRM courses in university curricula in various forms.

Adaptation to anthropogenic climate change is the biggest challenge that humankind faces. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a synthesis of the state of the science, impacts, and policy, with a focus on long-term climate trends. However, the worst impacts of climate change are likely to come from its exacerbation of weather and climate variability. For example, higher temperatures in a particular region could lead to harsher droughts and more deadly heat waves. These are also the kinds of hazards that are regularly monitored and forecast by governments and institutions at the national, regional, and international scale. This paper argues that climate services are a critical component of adaptation. Communities that benefit from climate services will be better adapted to long-term climate change as well as the weather events and the year to-year variability it could make worse. Climate services involve the production, translation, transfer, and use of climate knowledge and information in relevant decision-making, policy and planninga. They involve far more than climate data, encompassing an understanding of the needs of decision makers and delivering useful information in ways it can be applied for better results. A well-functioning climate service can help decision-makers understand, anticipate, and manage climate-related risks across the range of relevant time scales, from days to decades, much in the way a national meteorological service (NMS) does for weather. Yet, in most of the world, climate services are not sufficiently developed, nor are they properly aligned with the needs of decision-makers in the sectors and systems that are most at risk. The urgency of the climate challenge calls for a critical examination of the current state of climate services relative to the needs of decision-makers; it also requires aggressive action to address long-standing obstacles to meeting those needs. While several decades of research, investment, and implementation provide a strong foundation for climate services, more deliberate action is needed to position climate services as essential to adaptation.