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> home > programs & activities > vulnerability and adaptation > CLIMAG CLIMAG Agriculture and its associated industries are the primary sources of food and the major employment sector in most developing countries. Hunger affects one out of every seven people on the planet. Unless the world community undertakes intensive and sustained corrective action, 700 million people could remain chronically undernourished in 2010. The majority of the world’s poor and food-insecure depend on agriculture for livelihood and sustenance, most in regions that are characterized by marginal soils and climate, lack of access to irrigation, and therefore dependence on the uncertainty of rainfall. Climate fluctuations impact household food security through subsistence production, farm income, local food prices, and sometimes the economy of an entire region. Climatic extremes, such as drought and flooding, take a direct toll on lives, livelihoods, assets and infrastructure. For the risk-averse farmer, the inability to anticipate when climatic extremes will occur is a disincentive to experiment, and necessitates conservative risk management strategies that buffer against climatic extremes at the expense of inefficient resource use, reduced average productivity and profitability, and accelerated resource degradation. Human-induced climate change, increasing climate variability, and global environmental issues such as land degradation, loss of biological diversity and stratospheric ozone depletion, increasingly threaten our ability to meet basic human needs such as adequate food, water and energy, safe shelter and a healthy environment. In February 1997, START, WCRP, and IGBP-GCTE sponsored a workshop in Bogor, Indonesia to review crop modeling approaches and develop recommendations for a longer-term integrated study on climate variability and agriculture in the Asian monsoon region. Participants at the Bogor workshop (and a subsequent meeting in Cotonou) agreed that a collaborative research program should be launched, and that it would adopt a case study approach on a regional basis to link climate variability prediction and crop production. The Climate Prediction and Agriculture (CLIMAG) project was initiated following the International Workshop on Climate Prediction and Agriculture held in Geneva in September 1998. CLIMAG is based on the awareness of the adverse impact climate variability has on agriculture, and the premise that advances in climate knowledge and prediction capacity at the seasonal time scale can contribute to adaptive management and resilience within agricultural systems and therefore to food and livelihood security. CLIMAG is an interdisciplinary project implemented in the developing regions of the world by START in partnership with the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction (IRI), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - Office of Global Programs (NOAA-OGP), the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN), the Agricultural Production Systems Research Unit (APSRU), and the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI). The goal of CLIMAG is to demonstrate the practical utility of forecasts of regional climate variability at intra-seasonal to seasonal scales in agricultural decision-making. Climate Research special issue on CLIMAG Inter-Research just posted the Climate Research special issue, "Advances in applying climate prediction to agriculture," on the web: http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/cr/v33/n1/ The publisher offered open access at generous terms, and the three sponsoring institutions (IRI, WMO, START) provided the necessary investment, which means that the papers are freely available for download. We hope and expect that this special issue will be a substantial and quite visible contribution to our collective efforts to improve the quality of live for those rural populations who suffer most from the adverse impacts of climatic risk. CLIMAG Strategic Plan (PDF) |
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