A one day workshop on “Adaptation to Increase Resilience to Climate Change in Ethiopian Agriculture” was held on 7 November 2014 at Capital Hotel and Spa, Addis Ababa. The workshop was organized by the EfD center in Ethiopia called Environmental Economics Policy Forum for Ethiopia (EEPFE) based at the Ethiopian Development Research Institute (EDRI).. It was a workshop held to launch an IDRC funded project. The aim of the workshop was to discuss preliminary research results and brainstorm ideas for future work. The workshop brought together over fifty decision makers, researchers, project developers, practitioners and implementers from over thirty five governmental and non-governmental organizations. H.E. Ato Neway Genre-ab, Executive Director of EDRI made welcome remarks and H.E. Ato Sileshi Getahun, State Minster, Ministry of Agriculture made opening remarks. Dr Gunnar Kohlin also made some remarks focusing on the work of the Environment for Development (EfD) initiative and its complementarity with the IDRC funded project.
The following presentations were made and discussed at the workshop:
- Summary of Research project on ‘Adaptation to increase Resilience to Climate change in Ethiopian Agriculture’ by Alemu Mekonnen, PhD, Addis Ababa University and EfD Ethiopia Center Director
- Analysis of Adoption and Impact of Agricultural Adaptation Technologiesby HailemariamTekelwold(Ph.D.), Researcher at EEPFE/EDRI
- Experiment to ExamineApproaches to Deliver Information to Farmers by HaileselassieMedhin (Ph.D.), Researcher at EEPFE/EDRI and
- Best Land and Water ManagementPractices in Ethiopia by TenaAlamirew(Ph.D.), Deputy Director , Water and Land Resource Center.
Towards the end of the workshop there was a breakout session involving three groups which provided very essential inputs for the on-going project. The groups were:
Group 1- Adoption and Impact of Soil and Water Management Technologies
Group 2- On Approaches to deliver information on best soil and water management technologies to stakeholders (mainly farmers)
Group 3- The best ways of communicating results of such research to policy and decision makers
The output of these discussion points are expected to be very relevant inputs and source of new ideas for the ongoing project.
Mark Redwood, Leader of the Climate Change and Water program of IDRC who made some remarks at the beginning of the workshop also made useful concluding remarks at the end.
Dr Gunnar Kohlin, Dr Bhim Adhikari and Dr Alemu Mekonnen chaired the different sessions of the workshop.
This project aims to enhanceadaptation capacity of farmers by analyzing the profitability and efficiency of combinations of technologies as well as key barriers for optimal adaption by building on and analyzing data which has a focus on climate change in small-scale agriculture. The study will contain gender differentiated risk experiments to better understand the barriers to adoption. This analysis will then be used as the foundation for a randomized controlled trial. The intervention will be evaluated with subsequent surveys. The findings from the project will be directly implementable in currently on-going governmental programs such as the Climate Resilient Green Economy strategy and the 2nd phase of the Sustainable Land Management sector program.