• Time for the New Dry Season Forecast 2020-21 is Available (Click on the Banner to Access the Forecast)!

Project Overview

How do relationships between scientists, farmers, water managers, and authorities influence the production, dissemination, and outcome of new scientific knowledge? This project establishes an international research and education partnership to promote a political-institutional model of science that links sociological and engineering methods in a people-centered approach to the human-climate-water-agriculture-energy nexus in the Blue Nile basin (BNB), Ethiopia.

The project is a multi-year collaborative endeavor that will run from 2016 to 2021. By the end of the project, the research team will have crafted state-of-the-art tools to help smallholder farmers make practical decisions about water, crops, and fertilizers and ultimately gain more secure access to food and water in the face of increasingly challenging climatic extremes.

Curious to see this year’s forecast? [CLICK HERE!]

Project Goals

The UConn PIRE project brings people and resources together across disciplinary, cultural, and geographical boundaries to promote knowledge-driven and rights-based interventions that enhance food and water security in vulnerable settings. We promote a political-institutional model of science that links sociological and engineering methods for a people-centered approach. Our political-institutional approach integrates graduate and undergraduate education, professional training, and community outreach into the research program to develop the human capital and social connections between all stakeholders—scientists, farmers, policymakers and students in the United States and in Ethiopia. The project achieves its objectives through:

Provision of superior quality seasonal forecast information at a scale relevant to local farmers and water resource managers — Learn More

Identifying political-institutional barriers that influence the uptake of new forecast information — Learn More

Training a new generation of global expert that constitute competitive international workforce — Learn More

PIRE News

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NSF PIRE researcher Fahad Khan Khadim selected by NASA for a postdoctoral fellowship at Goddard Space Flight Center

Fahad Khan Khadim, UConn CEE PhD student, on his field trip in summer 2019 to Koga irrigation area, Ethiopia.Fahad Khan Khadim, a final year PhD stude . . .

Published: Feb 27, 2022

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PIRE Impact Day – A Collaboration Between Bahir Dar Institute of Technology and UConn

  Ethiopian high school students have been an integral part of the Water and Food Security PIRE project’s Citizen Science Initiative for severa . . .

Published: Aug 10, 2021

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Graduation of Meijian Yang – the crop yield modeler from the PIRE team

After having a break due to the pandemic in 2020, UConn organized its in-person commencement On May 8th, 2021, where Meijian Yang, a UConn Environment . . .

Published: May 17, 2021

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Contact us

Prof. Emmanouil Anagnostou

Principal Investigator, Water and Food Security PIRE
Director, Eversource Energy Center
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Connecticut
Email: manos@uconn.edu

 

Kristen Kirksey

Project Manager, Water and Food Security PIRE
Graduate Research Assistant
Department of Sociology, University of Connecticut
Email: kristen.kirksey@uconn.edu

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