Foto Shutterstock WUR and the Digital Agri Hub, together with other partners, are organising an EU side event at the Climate Summit on digital climate advisory services (DCAS) for small-scale producers in low and middle-income countries.
DCAS observe and predict the weather during the next week, month and year. It adds information on crops and farming, providing advice to farmers on, for instance, when to sow, spray and harvest. DCAS also gives long-term predictions about climate change and what this change would mean for, among others, the selection of crops and usage of water.
Blueprint
The event takes stock of the ‘Blueprint for Climate Informed Digital Advisory Services’, and the recently launched Digital Agri Hub. It intends to put knowledge into action so that good quality DCAS services will be accessible to many farmers.
‘Many organisations and providers are working on climate data and services in several regions’, says Tomaso Ceccarelli, a researcher at Wageningen Environmental Research who works on the Digital Agri Hub. ‘One of the Hub’s tasks is to connect with all these organisations and provide a good overview of what exists. This is valuable information for investors, governments and, ultimately, farmers’.
Hub
The Digital Agri Hub is a project led by WUR in partnership with the GSM Association, Grameen Foundation and the Dutch National Advisory Board. The Hub will not only deal with digital services for climate advice but also with other solutions for agriculture, such as supply chain management and micro-finance. You can visit a dashboard at https://digitalagrihub.org/
There is a great need for more information about climate change among farmers, says Ceccarelli. ‘But climate change is in the future, and our understanding of its impact still has a lot of uncertainties. We do not have all the answers, but we can improve what we know and connect the many players in this field’.
Together with partners, Sander Janssen of WUR will present the Digital Climate Advisory Services at the Climate Summit in Glasgow on Monday, 8 November.
And register and join the event here.
