New strategic partnership between CCAFS and Wageningen University and Research for impact on food security
Thursday, 2017/04/20 | 07:46:09
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CCAFS April 3, 2017 by Bruce Campbell
We launched the new global coordinating office of CCAFS in Wageningen and discussed partnerships to enhance our impact.
In 2009, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) began its life as a CGIAR Challenge Program, before transforming into a CGIAR Research Program (CRP) in 2011. This year brings some new exciting changes for us. At the beginning of this year, the CCAFS began its second phase (from 2017 to 2022), with the aim to position CGIAR to play a major role in scaling up practices, technologies and institutions that enable agriculture to meet the triple goals of food security, adaptation and mitigation. In its second phase, CCAFS will continue to be led by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), and work with all 15 CGIAR centres in five regions: East and West Africa, South and South East Asia, and Latin America, with global coordination from the newly launched office in Wageningen University and Research (WUR).
In Phase I there were many exciting developments, with over 600 research papers delivered. But perhaps more important was the development outcomes that CCAFS contributed to. To address the need for proven and effective climate-smart agriculture (CSA) options, CCAFS developed the Climate-Smart Village (CSV) approach. This was piloted in 2012 in West Africa, East Africa and South Asia, and in 2014 it was expanded to Latin America and Southeast Asia. Today, CCAFS and its partners facilitate agricultural research for development (AR4D) in about 36 CSV sites, where we test technological and institutional options through participatory methods. Meanwhile, development agencies and governments have embraced integrated approaches to climate change, modeled on the CSV approach; and there are now several thousand CSVs being implemented. CCAFS also worked closely with partners to deliver climate information to farmers (e.g. seasonal forecasts) with the biggest success in Senegal where these were delivered to 7 million farmers through community radio.
Partnership was key – with the meteorological agency, Columbia University for the cutting edge science of forecasts, the agricultural ministry and the association of community radios. The private sector is seen as a crucial part to scaling solutions – for example in India where our insurance partner, the Agriculture Insurance Company of India is delivering new insurance products to a million farmers – based on CCAFS crop modeling and climate downscaling. CCAFS Phase II: What’s new?The overall goal of CCAFS is to catalyse positive change towards climate-smart agriculture, food systems and landscapes, and thereby contribute to impact in three dimensions: 1. Reducing poverty; 2. Improving food and nutrition security for health; 3. Improving natural resource systems and ecosystem services. Each of these dimensions has a specific target to be achieved by CCAFS.
Phase II sees an increase in collaboration with WUR, and other Dutch agencies. This was highlighted in the one-day seminar today to officially launch the new CCAFS office and present the program to WUR staff, Dutch ministries, other Dutch universities and organizations based in the Netherlands.
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