By Daniel Otunge
Despite efforts over the past three decades to provide helpful weather and climate information to smallholder farmers in the Global South, little has been achieved due to a lack of adequate funding and global coordination, better forecast quality and delivery methods, and innovative technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to make weather predictions more affordable and accessible in resource-constrained settings.
This is set to change if the announcement of a new package for a cost-effective innovation to help hundreds of millions of farmers in low—and middle-income countries (LMICs) adapt to changing weather patterns is anything to go by.
The package, unveiled under the Agriculture Innovation for Scale (AIM for Scale ), aims to provide timely and accurate weather information to smallholder farmers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which are heavily affected by climate change.
AIM for Scale, announced at COP28 as part of a new partnership between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), is a multi-partner effort to transition evidence-based, cost-effective innovations to scale for the benefit of farmers affected by climate change.
The package worth over one billion dollars ($1b) will scale up weather services in target regions. It will harness the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to help national meteorological and hydrological services (NMHS) produce high-quality, farmer-centered forecasts.
Experts at the AIM for Scale, the Innovation Commission for Climate Change, Food Security, and Agriculture, believe that “Co-producing and disseminating these forecasts to millions of farmers can build resilience and support adaptation as climate change makes weather patterns less predictable.”
This Innovation Package addresses investment and coordination gaps along the supply chain of weather services for farmers. It includes upstream and downstream investments to improve the quality and availability of weather observations and agricultural data, develop tools to validate the farmer-relevant accuracy of weather forecasts, accelerate the generation of state-of-the-art farmer-centered forecasts, and facilitate the dissemination of high-quality forecasts to farmers.
A consortium of global partners, including the World Bank and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has committed to mobilizing significant investments over the next three years to drive the implementation of the AIM for Scale Weather Package.
The World Bank, for example, is investing $1.46 billion in data-driven digital agriculture that aligns with the AIM for Scale goals. About $591 million of this is in the Africa region, aimed at, among other things, providing the ideal vehicle to transmit high-quality, timely weather information to millions of African farmers.
Speaking at the COP 29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, where the package was announced, Professor Celeste Saulo, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization, welcomed the partnership, noting: “More and better data leads to better weather forecasts, early warning systems, and climate information services for agriculture and other vital economic sectors. Closing basic data gaps will also help inform AI models.”
Saulo said, “The agriculture sector is undoubtedly one of the most vulnerable to climate variability and change. Additional partnerships are needed to ensure that farmers are involved in coproducing weather and climate services to enhance resilience and adaptation in the agriculture sector.”
The Innovation Commission for Climate Change, Food Security, and Agriculture and Chair of AIM for Scale’s Advisory Panel, Nobel laureate Michael Kremer, said, “There is a wealth of evidence that smallholder farmers benefit from high-quality weather forecasts. Yet, the challenge of reaching hundreds of millions of farmers remains. AIM for Scale is vital to filling this gap by leveraging new investments and global partnerships.”
The Innovation Commission for Climate Change, Food Security, and Agriculture is an independent initiative at the University of Chicago. It identifies innovations with rigorous evidence of impact and cost-effectiveness and early-stage innovations with high expected returns and generates recommendations for transitioning them to scale.
This ambitious climate package for disadvantaged farmers in the Global South couldn’t have come at a better time. Evidence shows that existing mechanisms have invested just four percent of climate finance in food-related projects and only one percent in addressing the rapidly growing climate threats facing food systems supplied by small-scale farmers in LMICs. This chronic underfunding jeopardizes efforts to tackle hunger, poverty, and malnutrition while ignoring food system innovation’s critical potential to curb carbon emissions.
As the Finance COP gets underway, discussions on the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) on Climate Finance are expected to take center stage. Hopefully, the outcome of these climate talks will shape commitments that would determine whether food system innovations and agricultural adaptation will receive the further support they urgently need.
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