The SmartAG partner: CCAFS East Africa Bi-Annual Newsletter, July - December 2019

We are pleased to share with you our SmartAg Partner bi-annual newsletter, highlighting policy engagement, ongoing research, field updates and activities with partners from the second half of 2019

5th Annual Progress Reporting and Coordination Meeting on CCAFS Projects and Regional Activities in Southeast Asia

The proceedings document the results of the 5th Annual Progress Reporting and Coordination Meeting on CCAFS Projects and Regional Activities in Southeast Asia. The report tackles the progress of activities in the CSV sites and on CCAFS project implementation in 2019; the significant outputs and outcomes of FP/CSV implementation; and the knowledge, learning, and experiences across projects

National climate, agriculture and socio-economic development policies and plans formulated with the use of scenarios across six global regions

Climate change impacts bring great uncertainty, raising the need to plan for the future. As the impacts of climate change are complex and far-reaching, it can be extremely difficult to foresee exactly what the consequences will be, and how they will affect different regions and sectors. However, by bringing together relevant stakeholders and brainstorming "what if" ideas of possible future scenarios, policy makers can prepare themselves for a variety of potential challenges. Including stakeholders from diverse backgrounds can avoid blindspots focused on a single vision of the future

Enhancing National Climate Services (ENACTS) in Ethiopia: A participatory demonstration workshop for Key National and International Development Partners

Ethiopia’s National Meteorological Agency’s (NMA) Enhancing National Climate Services (ENACTS) is a collaborative tool developed by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), The Earth Institute at Columbia University, National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHS) which is supported by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and international and national partners including the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS)

Strengthening Climate-Resilient Agricultural Systems in South Asia: CCAFS South Asia Regional Meeting Report

State of the art discourse on agriculture and climate change, lays emphasis on the dual role of agriculture in adapting to and mitigating climate change. Recognising the same, many countries are laying emphasis on agriculture while preparing their national adaptation plans (NAPs). In congruence with the world’s agenda to facilitate sustainable agricultural practices, while reducing poverty and hunger, CCAFS has been working for last 10 years to generate innovative solutions to promote more adaptable and resilient agriculture and food systems. South Asia regional office of Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) has been: generating research based knowledge, mainstreaming climate variability and climate change issues into development strategies and institutional agendas; enhancing people's understanding of climate change issues; and facilitating informed decisions on policies and actions based on the best available information and data in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, with extended research and knowledge based services extended onto Bhutan and Sri Lanka. With the vision of drawing learnings from the work done so far to elucidate the strategy of the coming years, a regional meeting titled “Strengthening Climate-Resilient Agricultural Systems in South Asia” was organised by CCAFS- South Asia in Bali- Indonesia from 6th to 7th Oct 2019. The meeting also aspired to build as well as further strengthen already existing institutional partnership. The two-day agenda included thematic sessions on topics such as developing and evaluating alternative policy and institutional models for scaling-up climate smart food system in South Asia, big-data analytics to identify and overcome scaling limitations to climate-smart agricultural practices in South Asia, capacity building for scaling up CSA via South- South collaboration among others. The meeting culminated with an agreement on the need for revisiting CCAFS research approach to build science based evidence, to facilitate formulation of better policies and programs, for a food secure world

CCAFS Program of Work and Budget 2016

The 2016 program of work and budget of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) lays out the key activities and budget in 2016

CCAFS annual report 2010: World’s largest coalition of researchers on climate change, agriculture and food security gears up

2010 saw the culmination of the most significant reform of the CGIAR system in its some 40 years of existence. A key element of this reform was the reorganization of the CGIAR around research programs that cut across Centres. One of the new research programs is on climate change. Because the Challenge Program was well positioned in terms of having initiated work on climate change, it was asked to lead the process of developing an expanded climate change program, one of only two fast-tracked programs. The climate change portfolio in the CGIAR is now expected to at least treble in size in 2011. The partnership in the new program represents the largest coalition of scientists working on the nexus between agriculture and climate change

Carbon footprint report 2012

In 2011 CCAFS Coordinating Unit (CCAFS CU) initiated a carbon footprint plan including emission reduction targets and offsetting

Beyond the climate science: CCAFS downscaled climate data applied by development agencies around the world

In sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the limited availability of climate data and networks for sharing information can serve as a constraint to agricultural research and development. The lack of basic understanding of earth processes needed to detect flaws in climate models and decide how best to combine climate and crop models in research is another constraint. In order to address these contraints, CCAFS reviewed the knowledge on climate data and crop modelling and ways of coupling agriculture– climate predictions. The result was the successful development of CCAFS-Climate, a data portal that has become the place to get free and open-access downscaled climate data useful for understanding the effects of climate change on agriculture. The portal includes the MarkSim GCM tool, which generates plausible daily data for future climates. Since its launch, the CCAFS-Climate portal has become popular among the research community as well as with other stakeholder groups. Almost 1700 institutions from 185 countries have used the portal for a range of purposes, including: studying climate change impacts at the country-level for informing decision makers, government planning, informing crop insurance policy development, and water policy development. The users included around 400 non-research institutions from 60 countries, indicative of the portal’s popularity outside of the research community

Zooming in on climate change data

The agricultural sector will be hit hard by climate change. More than 265 million people are facing a five percent decrease in growing season duration in the next 40 years due to an increasingly variable and hotter climate sweeping across the globe. Climate change will affect all four aspects of food security, from availability and stability of food supplies to people’s access to and utilization of food. If we are to successfully tackle threats to food security, we need more robust climate data that will help us prepare and plan for these shifts. The CCAFS-Climate Data portal provides users with vigorous, high-resolution climate data that can help assess the impacts of climate change on agriculture