Applying Climate Services to Transformative Adaptation in Agriculture

Abstract

As climate change increasingly affects agriculture around the world, reliable, timely, and targeted information about weather and climate conditions is becoming an ever more urgent requirement for adaptation decision-making. This paper considers how transformative adaptation – long-term, systemic change to fundamental aspects of systems in response to or anticipation of severe climate change impacts - could be accelerated by enhancing climate services and how they are applied. The paper explores how components of climate services – defined as systems to develop and provide climate information to meet users’ needs - could be enhanced for building and implementing transformative pathways. It looks at current challenges and opportunities in climate service design and suggests how different types of information and data can be used to better integrate climate services into adaptation and development plans for systemic change. The paper concludes by providing recommendations for researchers, policymakers, and adaptation funding entities.

Food Systems at Risk: Transformative Adaptation for Long-Term Food Security

“…Based on this research, a framework that included a workable definition for transformative adaptation in agriculture was established (Carter et al 2018). This framework was then applied in three working papers on key agricultural topics: crop research and development (Niles et al 2020), livestock production (Salman et al 2019), and climate services (Ashley et al 2020). World Resources Institute (WRI) researchers also applied the TACR framework to coffee production in Costa Rica (Tye and Grinspan 2020) and tested it on locally led climate-driven transformations in Costa Rica, Bhutan, and Ethiopia (Ferdinand et al 2020).…”

“…▪ Research organizations, with support from governments and funding entities, should enhance climate services and information platforms with new types of information to identify hotspots and aid decision-makers in designing transformative pathways. This necessitates providing easily understandable information with greater consideration for slow-onset events and decadal and longer-term data and projections (Ashley et al 2020); more transparent data around intersectoral tradeoffs on natural resource use, prices, and market models (Tye and Grinspan 2020); and other non-climate variables important for planning and prioritization (Ashley et al 2020). Also needed are more robust baseline data collection and greater availability and accessibility of high-resolution, contextualized data on climate change impacts (Ashley et al 2020).…”

“…This necessitates providing easily understandable information with greater consideration for slow-onset events and decadal and longer-term data and projections (Ashley et al 2020); more transparent data around intersectoral tradeoffs on natural resource use, prices, and market models (Tye and Grinspan 2020); and other non-climate variables important for planning and prioritization (Ashley et al 2020). Also needed are more robust baseline data collection and greater availability and accessibility of high-resolution, contextualized data on climate change impacts (Ashley et al 2020). Improved climate-crop suitability models and analyses are a prerequisite to increasing understanding of which varieties and species will lose and gain suitability in different regions (Ashley et al 2020;Niles et al 2020).…”

“…Also needed are more robust baseline data collection and greater availability and accessibility of high-resolution, contextualized data on climate change impacts (Ashley et al 2020). Improved climate-crop suitability models and analyses are a prerequisite to increasing understanding of which varieties and species will lose and gain suitability in different regions (Ashley et al 2020;Niles et al 2020). Information on broader production conditions, markets, and other types of risks to agriculture could be added in to enable a more holistic risk assessment.…”

“…This framework was then applied in three working papers on key agricultural topics: crop research and development (Niles et al 2020), livestock production (Salman et al 2018), and climate services (Ashley et al 2020). Each of these papers started with its own detailed and technical review of relevant literature on each topic.…”