Advancing Climate Data Integration in Agroecological Research

Lead Organization:

Centro International de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT)

Partner Organizations:

Stats4SD; Climate Hazards Centre (CHC), UC Santa Barbara; East Africa Agroecology-Hubs; Alliance Bioversity International and CIAT (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded projects); CGIAR: Excellence in Agronomy Initiative; ABC: Evidence for Resilient Agriculture (ERA) Team; CGIAR Climate Platform; CGIAR Agroecology Initiative and Agroecology Transformative Partnership Platform (TPP)

Community of Practice:

East & Southern Africa

Countries:

Tanzania, Kenya, and Malawi

Duration:

1/2025—4/2026

Overview:

This project seeks to enhance the capacity of agroecological (AE) researchers to integrate climate data into their research, facilitating the generation of robust evidence that demonstrates AE systems’ role in climate adaptation. The project aims to address the technical barriers to climate data access, processing, and synthesis by developing an open-source toolkit. This toolkit will enable AE researchers to evaluate climate risks, particularly focusing on farming system diversification as a means of mitigating climate hazards such as drought, heat, or waterlogging. The Evidence for Resilient Agriculture (ERA) dataset will serve as a case study to demonstrate the toolkit’s effectiveness.

Grant Aims:

The project aims to:

  1. Develop an open-access climate data toolkit for AE researchers.
  2. Lower technical barriers to climate data analysis in AE research.
  3. Enhance the integration of climate risk data into AE practices.
  4. Build the capacity of AE researchers in using climate data to evaluate farming system resilience.

Outputs and Outcomes:

Outputs

  1. Development of an open-access climate data toolkit in R
    A toolkit designed for technical users proficient in R programming, available on GitHub. The toolkit will provide functions to retrieve high-quality climate data and transform it into relevant climate metrics for crop and livestock productivity, as well as capabilities to calculate climate risk profiles for assessing impacts on agroecological systems.
  2. Publication of a detailed workflow in R
    An annotated R workflow, showing how to use the toolkit to evaluate agroecological systems under different climate scenarios. This will include instructions, methodologies, and a case study using the ERA dataset.
  3. Meta-analysis of climate adaptation potential of AE practices
    A meta-analysis evaluating the effectiveness of farming system diversification in enhancing climate resilience, resulting in a peer-reviewed journal article.
  4. Development of an interactive notebook hosted by the Adaptation Atlas
    An online Observable notebook that allows non-technical users to generate customized climate reports, integrated within the Adaptation Atlas website, promoting AE practices and raising their profile for future investment.

Outcomes

  1. Lowered Barriers to Evidence Generation
    The toolkit simplifies climate data analysis, lowering technical barriers for AE researchers and enabling easier access to, processing, and analysis of climate data.
  2. Built Capacity within the AE Research Community
    Researchers will gain advanced analytical tools and the knowledge to evaluate the impacts of climate on agroecological systems, improving their ability to adapt their practices based on scientific evidence.
  3. Facilitated Evidence Generation for Agroecological Practices
    With the toolkit and interactive platform, researchers, local decision-makers, and policy advisors can integrate climate data into AE studies, contributing to a stronger, evidence-based foundation for advocating and implementing agroecological practices.