Collecting household level data on varietal diversification and adaptation strategies to climate change in East Africa

This training manual presents the objectives, tools and approaches used to train a field team for the survey on socio-economic and environmental factors that lead to farmers’ vulnerability as part of a project entitled “Linking genetic vulnerability to loss of resilience to adapt to climate change”. This training manual gives suggestions for field coordinators and researchers who have to train survey teams in field sites on how to collect data from rural households and communities. The methodology was developed and tested in research areas in CCAFS benchmark sites of Nyando and Makueni in Kenya and in Hombolo district in Tanzania

Guiding focus group discussions on varietal diversification and adaptation to climate change in East Africa

This training manual presents the objectives and tools used in focus group discussions for the survey on socio-economic and environmental factors that lead to farmers’ vulnerability as part of a joint project entitled “Linking genetic vulnerability to loss of resilience to adapt to climate change”. This manual provides suggestions for field coordinators and researchers who are organizing focus group discussions in farming communities. It serves as a training manual for facilitators and allows them to familiarize themselves with the objectives of the focus groups and the tools used to collect data. The methodology was developed and tested in CCAFS benchmark sites of Nyando and Makueni in Kenya and in Hombolo district in Tanzania

A novel strategy to discover and use climate-adapted germplasm

Between 2012 and 2015, 150 researchers, research managers, gene bank managers, extension agents, university professors and staff of non-government organizations from Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Guatemala, Nepal, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe acquired new knowledge and skills about the use of climate and crop modelling tools and data sources including the climate analogue tool introduced through the CGIAR research programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). Applying these tools and data to their national context, they assessed the changing needs for national and foreign-sourced plant genetic resources for food and agriculture in the context of climate change adaptation. Research teams are now designing strategies to deploy germplasm that is better adapted to future climate changes and that could contribute to increased food security. They are integrating these strategies into organizational agenda’s that will be implemented with own resources

First experiences with a novel farmer citizen science approach: crowdsourcing participatory variety selection through on-farm triadic comparisons of technologies (TRICOT)

Rapid climatic and socio-economic changes challenge current agricultural R&D capacity. The necessary quantum leap in knowledge generation should build on the innovation capacity of farmers themselves. A novel citizen science methodology, triadic comparisons of technologies or tricot, was implemented in pilot studies in India, East Africa, and Central America. The methodology involves distributing a pool of agricultural technologies in different combinations of three to individual farmers who observe these technologies under farm conditions and compare their performance. Since the combinations of three technologies overlap, statistical methods can piece together the overall performance ranking of the complete pool of technologies. The tricot approach affords wide scaling, as the distribution of trial packages and instruction sessions is relatively easy to execute, farmers do not need to be organized in collaborative groups, and feedback is easy to collect, even by phone. The tricot approach provides interpretable, meaningful results and was widely accepted by farmers. The methodology underwent improvement in data input formats. A number of methodological issues remain: integrating environmental analysis, capturing gender-specific differences, stimulating farmers' motivation, and supporting implementation with an integrated digital platform. Future studies should apply the tricot approach to a wider range of technologies, quantify its potential contribution to climate adaptation, and embed the approach in appropriate institutions and business models, empowering participants and democratizing science

Crop variety management for climate adaptation supported by citizen science

Crop adaptation to climate change requires accelerated crop variety introduction accompanied by recommendations to help farmers match the best variety with their field contexts. Existing approaches to generate these recommendations lack scalability and predictivity in marginal production environments. We tested if crowdsourced citizen science can address this challenge, producing empirical data across geographic space that, in aggregate, can characterize varietal climatic responses. We present the results of 12,409 farmer-managed experimental plots of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) in Nicaragua, durum wheat (Triticum durum Desf.) in Ethiopia, and bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) in India. Farmers collaborated as citizen scientists, each ranking the performance of three varieties randomly assigned from a larger set. We show that the approach can register known specific effects of climate variation on varietal performance. The prediction of variety performance from seasonal climatic variables was generalizable across growing seasons. We show that these analyses can improve variety recommendations in four aspects: reduction of climate bias, incorporation of seasonal climate forecasts, risk analysis, and geographic extrapolation. Variety recommendations derived from the citizen science trials led to important differences with previous recommendations

Seeds for Needs - East Africa: Helping farming communities cope with the effects of climate change by providing access to locally adapted seeds

The Seeds for Needs initiative works with farmers to research how agricultural biodiversity can help minimize the risks associated with climate change. At the same time Seeds for Needs is helping farming communities cope with the effects of climate change by providing access to locally adapted seeds. This poster gives an overview of the projects in East Africa. Activities are ongoing in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda