Agriculture - soon a key component in Nepal's climate change agenda?

By Chase Sova

Persistence and diversification. Oddly enough, these two themes prove common between successful climate change adaptation, as well as getting to meet the Prime Minister of Nepal, Mr. Baburam Bhattarai. At least, this is the light-hearted lesson that The Adaptation to progressive climate change- and Oxford University Research Teamdrew from their recent meeting with the Prime Minister in early August.

Researchers Chase Sova and Prajwal Baral got the exclusive opportunity to sit down with the Prime Minister at his home office in Baluwtar, Kathmandu to discuss the climate change agenda within his administration. The meeting came at the end of one month of nearly 100 in-depth-interviews across Nepal’s climate change and agricultural sectors, including many members of Bhattarai’s government.

The chance to meet the Prime Minister doesn’t come by very often, and therefore both researchers took the opportunity to brief him on the research activities carried out by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). At present, this includes a team of Oxford PhD researchers moving between the Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, and the southern district of Rupandehi (near the border of India) piloting CCAFS climate analogue tool and Farms of the Future program.

Considered to be Nepal’s most highly educated leader to date, Bhattarai’s reputation is certainly merited. He recalled during the talk his recent trip to Rio de Janeiro for the Rio+20 sustainability conference, where he played an important role as spokesperson for developing nations, reflecting Nepal’s current position as chair of the least developed countries (LDCs) in that forum. He expressed that given Nepal’s minimal contributions to emissions, that the climate change “paradigm” in the country is very different when compared to industrialized nations. He referred to the commonly cited ‘pillars’ of sustainable development - economic, social and environmental - to suggest that Nepal will face the greatest challenge in navigating the social and economic pillars in the face of climate change.

The Prime Minister also spoke of the worrying indications of snowmelt in the high-mountains and deviations of rivers in the mid-hills region of Nepal, even going as for to inquire why the research team had chosen the Terai plains for their research given these pressing challenges. Chase Sova responded by indicating the potential ripple effects that a loss of agricultural productivity and rural livelihoods could have on Nepal’s largely agricultural based economy. He stressed the need for research in each of Nepal’s diverse ecological regions, including the Terai “breadbasket”, reinforcing the need to consider agriculture as a key component of the PM’s climate change agenda. Seeing as the researchers had the opportunity to direct these recommendations to the highest political level, CCAFS hopes the Prime Ministerwill  take these considerations to heart for future climate change discussions.

Original Article Here

Finding the future for farmers in Beora Nepal

The Farms of the Future project helps farmers envision their future climate by taking them there… on a bus. Neil Palmer, from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) reports from Beora, Nepal, where the first farmer visits recently took place. This story was originally posted on the CIAT blog.

I knew not to expect “guide book” Nepal: majestic, snowy peaks; multicoloured prayer flags fluttering against clear blue skies. But nothing quite prepared me for the Terai. Around 120 km west of the capital Kathmandu, this is a hazy, sweltering, lowland plain, where daytime temperatures hover around 45 degrees Celsius, with little respite after dark.

With the sweat pouring off you day and night, it’s so hot it’s hard to concentrate. Every few minutes for the first few days, I’d close my eyes and catch fleeting, dream-like sequences of gulping down ice cold water; gushing Alpine waterfalls; news footage of buff-chested Russians swan-diving into semi-frozen lakes. You shake the images away, but the heat persists.

Despite the tough conditions, the Terai is Nepal’s breadbasket, producing around 50% of the country’s food. Rice, wheat, maize and a variety of vegetables are all grown here, in the northeastern reaches of the Indo-Gangetic Plain.

But there’s pressure building in the system. Climate models indicate that average temperatures in Rupandehi – a district in the heart of the Terai – will rise by around 1.5 to 2 degrees by as soon as 2030. And as global C02 emissions continue to break new records, it’s safe to say that the increases probably won’t stop there. Also, the all-important monsoon rains – the driver of food production in the Terai – have been arriving late in recent years, disrupting the farming calendar.

It’s already so hot in the Terai, it’s hard to imagine what life would be like if it got any hotter. But a team of scientists from the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security Research Program (CCAFS) and Oxford University are working on just that. Earlier this year they identified the small agricultural community of Beora, in Rupandehi, as a baseline site for the Farms of the Future project.

The project aims to show farmers in Beora what their future climate could look like – by physically taking them there, on a bus. That’s because in an area with such diverse agricultural landscapes at a range of elevations, it’s likely that Beora’s future is the current reality for agricultural communities relatively nearby, at so-called “analogue sites”.

Locating these sites is made possible using a computer program, known as the climate analogue tool. Developed by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT)and CCAFS in partnership with the Walker Institute for Climate System Research and the UK’s University of Reading, it was officially launched during Agriculture and Rural Development Day, a parallel event at the COP17 climate change conference in Durban last December.

The tool takes multiple temperature and rainfall predictions for 2030 for a baseline site – in this case Beora – and searches for areas exhibiting those conditions today. As these variables are overlaid on a Google Earth map of western Nepal, patches of red appear, allowing the team to pinpoint specific sites.

How are farmers in these areas coping, and what can farmers in Beora learn from them, to help them adapt to climate change?

Equipped with a GPS device, the analogue maps, a soil sampling kit and probably too many emergency packs of biscuits, I was about to find out, as I joined the team on a 1000km scoping mission, to find the future of Beora.

Things were about to get even hotter.

Original Article Here