INTERFACES Colloquium Series - #6

Over 40 participants from the four regional projects, INTERFACES and external partners listened to the colloquium by Dr. Till Below on 22 February. Dr. Below is an agricultural economist and climate change expert working with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), his presentation was entitled: “Towards climate resilient agri‐food systems in Africa: Providing farmers with climate data for informed decision-making”. Dr. Below highlighted that climate information and associated decision-making support are key ingredients for the transformation of agriculture and food systems. While small-scale farmers across Africa still have very limited access to essential information on the climate in their location there are efforts to develop tools to assist them in making decisions. Dr. Below introduced two tools for climate forecasting: CRISP (Climate Risk Planning & Managing Tool for Development Programmes in Agri-Food Systems) and PICSA (Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture), which raised a lot of interest in the audience.

Contributors to the discussion were very interested to learn more on the technical details of the information tools and also voiced some concern about their usefulness to small-scale farmers outside of the pilot areas. Dr. Below invited participants to improve on the tools by contributing research results from the regional project.