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Tapfuma Machakaire
Zimbabwe this year commemorates World Climate Change Day tomorrow, July 28, a month after 80 participants from 24 countries attended a week-long Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) Regional Fundamentals Workshop in the resort town of Victoria Falls which was hosted by the Matopos wing of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT).

Climate change is a phenomenon that threatens to destroy not only our biodiversity, but to swiftly wipe out the gains that have been made to improve livelihoods of disadvantaged communities especially in developing nations.

The convergence of “great minds” who included leading scientists from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Asia and Africa, who compared and shared data with key stakeholders to prepare strategies and come up with innovative policy proposals in Victoria Falls from June 24 to 29 could be the panacea for effective, practical mitigatory mechanisms.

Among the objectives of AgMIP are to incorporate state-of-the-art climate products as well as crop and agricultural trade model improvements in coordinating regional and global assessments of future climate impacts, collaborate with regional experts in agronomy, economics, and climate to build strong basis for applied simulations while addressing key climate-related questions.

The project also seeks to improve science and adaptive capacity for major agricultural regions in the developing and developed world and develop framework to identify and prioritise adaptation strategies.

ICRISAT-Zimbabwe country representative Kizito Mazvimavi said modelling derives a lot on micro-level data collected from the farmers.

“The data is collected through participation with stakeholders, interpretation of results and the end point of when the results are going to be used.”

Mazvimavi says the researchers need to inform the extension workers of their findings before they can engage the policy makers and other stakeholders who include non-governmental organisations (NGO’s)

He cited the example of the micro dosing technology known to have come out of ICRISAT research efforts but which he said was a result of simulation modelling of bio-scientists who looked at different scenarios of applying fertilisers in drier areas when it had always been believed that applying fertiliser in dry areas would burn crops.

“When the modellers started looking at different scenarios of using different levels of fertilisers against the productivity, they noted that it was increasingly beneficial to apply small quantities even in very dry areas. The result was demonstrated through extension services and now fertiliser is widely promoted in semi-arid areas in Zimbabwe’s regions four and five where traditionally we never encouraged farmers to apply fertilisers, eventually leading to food security in those areas.”

Among the key stakeholders who attended the Victoria Falls AgMIP Fundamentals workshop was Dumisani Nyoni Provincial Agritex Officer for Matabeleland North Province who said his department deals with food security issues in Zimbabwe and engages farmers to improve productivity per unit area.

Nyoni said engaging with AgMIP scientists gives his department an opportunity to communicate the challenges that the extension workers are facing on the ground.

“We also have been able to learn from their research work and how best we can deal with the situations that are arising in the different parts of the country.”

He said natural ecological regions four and five under which the bulk of his province falls is becoming less and less food secure with climate change.

“The challenge is to come up with relevant crops that farmers can produce and production techniques to meet their food requirements and be able to improve their lives.”

Nyoni said Agritex has been working with the researchers by imputing what they would want to see happen in terms of research.

“Our area is drought prone and we want more research on climate modelling looking at the kind of crops that we’re growing. We need to know how climate change impacts on small grain production. We need to look at working with the scientists on which crop varieties would be drought tolerant and which varieties would mature faster under these circumstances.”

He said whatever research is being done should touch base with the farmer.

“There’s no need to generate research that will gather dust in the shelves. We need to view our input as linking the farmers and giving necessary indicators as we travel the road of developing technologies that are going to support the farmer’s production systems,” says Nyoni.

Cynthia Rosenzweig, co-Principal Investigator of AgMIP, who is the head of the Climate Impact Group at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, described phase two of the project as very exciting.

“We’re able to continue the very strong foundation of work from phase one in creating the methodology for the regional integrated assessments and the first manifestations of the new methodology.”

She said the Victoria Falls conference was special in that in phase two of the project the team was flipping its approach around and rather than starting with what the scientists think is important the team was going to the stakeholders asking what is important to them.

“Based on stakeholder inputs we’re creating strategic intervention policies by decision makers that will provide the best adaptation for the smallholder systems that are studied under AgMIP,” she said.

Under phase one which was the period between 2011 to 2014, AgMIP engaged global and regional stakeholders and researchers to assess climate impacts on food security and plan for more resilient future impacts on cutting-edge framework linking climate, crops, livestock, and economics to help decision makers better understand how climate change will reverberate through complex agricultural systems and markets.

The framework is intended to support decisions by non-governmental organisations, regional adaptation planners, extension agents, and smallholder farming groups in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Also new for phase two was the production of a web-based tool that was proposed in phase one, the AgMIP Impacts Explorer. This functional model would also support information exchange among stakeholders and researchers. AgMIP was also encouraged to make effective use of local media in their respective countries to communicate its findings to the grassroots.

The participants also had an opportunity to visit the Africa Centre for Holistic Management, a ranch 32 kilometres from the resort town that is implementing holistic livestock and land management strategies to reduce land degradation and minimise the impact of climate change.