Climate smart agriculture for smallholder farmers’ communities: co-development of genetic and forecasting climate services
Mercy Macharia, Martina Occelli, Mario Enrico Pè, Roberto Buizza and Matteo Dell’Acqua
Climate change has had adverse effects on the socio-economic development of Africa, driving higher the number of people living in extreme poverty. Shifting weather patterns including rainfall frequency and intensity, increasing temperature, and enhanced frequency of extreme events, threaten food security in the continent given the impacts these phenomena have on primary food production.
In Africa, the smallholder farming system is a major source of food production and income for the rural areas, which make up the largest share of the population. This type of farming is often conducted with low inputs, technology, and in challenging environments, making it particularly exposed to climate change.
Over the years, smallholder farmers have reported increasing unpredictability of weather events, fluctuating crop yields, increasing pressures of pest and diseases and, in some instances, severe food insecurity brought about by extreme weather events. Adaptation to climate change is highly heterogenous among smallholder farmers and depends extensively on how they perceive weather and climate trends; consequently, mitigation strategies are also highly variable and depending on local settings: they may include planting more trees, performing crop diversification, changing crop patterns, creating irrigation systems, and/or adopting resistant crop varieties. The underlying diversity of these strategies and perceptions, highlight the need for tailoring climate adaptation and resilience programs to the different socioeconomic contexts and climatic stresses that smallholder farmers encounter.
To allow sustainable intensification of smallholder farming systems, research must embrace this heterogeneity and understand which dimensions of change are sought by farmers, and how to address them with modern data-driven techniques. Enhancing the resilience of smallholder cropping system is paramount to enhance food security by smallholder farmers and consequently reduce poverty for millions of people in the world south.
Focus-Africa is a collaborative transdisciplinary project funded by the European Commission that brings together European and African experts to develop sustainable, tailored climate services for different sectors including energy, food security, water, and infrastructure in the SADC region. One of these case studies addresses food security in Mozambique, a country where smallholder farming system involves 15 million people.
Among African countries, Mozambique ranks third in countries most exposed to weather-related hazards. It has a long, 2,500 km coastline with a spread-out river delta, making it susceptible to periodic cyclones, droughts, heat waves and floods. These occurrences have worsened food insecurity particularly in smallholder farming communities, that constitute over half of the country’s population.
This case study will be implemented in Nampula Province in North-eastern Mozambique. In 2019, FAO classified this province as one of the riskiest food security areas in the country. The issues that the project aims to address are (i) lack of climate adapted crop varieties and (ii) scarce preparation for changing weather patterns. In these regards, we will utilise an innovative methodology that brings together climate science, genomics, and social science to develop a bottom-up approach in which climate services will be co-created with a smallholder farming community. By this, we aim to identify and characterise crop varieties best adapted to current and future climate stresses and to couple them with a text-based weather forecasting service providing farmers with key information on the outlook of the cropping season ahead.
This strategy relies on participatory approaches including comprehensive surveys and focus group discussions with 200 local smallholder farmers to identify cropping constrains and the most valuable climate traits for local agriculture. Smallholder families are not only food producers, but they are also consumers thus, we aim at capturing socio-economic data, agronomic practices, and their perception on climate change. We will also engage farmers and other stakeholders in focus group discussions to capture a wide array of their needs and challenges. These approaches will be aimed at collecting farmers needs on climate forecasting and climate resilient crop varieties. For the latter, we focus on the commonly grown crops, cowpea, and rice.
After having harnessed farmers’ needs and local knowledge, we will work on the development of tailored climate services, the first of which is an array of crop varieties best adapted to local agriculture. Crop genetic resources play a crucial role in response to ever changing agriculture production conditions now exacerbated by climate change, but smallholder farmers may lack awareness or resources to access favourable genetic resources outside of their communities. We have sourced large collections of landraces (seed collections with a historical origin in southern Africa) for cowpea and rice, and DNA sequencing will be conducted to characterise these collections for their diversity and their potential in supporting climate adaptation. Participatory variety selection will be coupled with the genomic characterisation to identify best varieties to be distributed to farmers.
The second climate service is a weather forecasting tool based on the assessment of current and future climate trends. This service will be developed with a focus on seasonal forecasting, using the enormous amount of data made available by the Copernicus program of the European Union. Re-analysis and modelling will be used to enhance the prediction ability in terms of temperature, rainfall, and extreme events, developing an index to be sourced for farmers to perform better decisions in their cropping endeavour.
The coupling of better adapted crop varieties with a better understanding of the upcoming weather will empower farmers to make informed decisions, leading to higher crop resilience. We hope that these results may support food security in the area and develop best practices that may be relevant to rural communities beyond Mozambique.
Learn more about this research via the Climate Exp0 media library.
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