Water and Food Security PIRE

The NSF-PIRE Water and Food Security Project’s 3^rd Annual Meeting (PIRE Annual Meeting) was held in the Innovation Partnership Building (IPB) of the University of Connecticut (UConn) premises, on November 21-22, 2019. It was a much-needed platform for sharing scientific knowledge and ideas pertaining to the successful continuation of the project, which included demonstrations of findings derived from the weather-hydro-crop models in the forms of keynote presentations, coupled with integrated brainstorming and round table discussions on many vital aspects of the project. About 20 participants from the U.S collaborating units (UConn, University of Wisconsin, University of Oklahoma, and World Bank) of the project joined the meeting to ensure a productive participation. Amongst the participants there were project PI and Co-PIs, Emmanouil Anagnostou, Elizabeth Holzer, Paul Block, and Liang You, and some faculty members, graduate and undergraduate students across the engineering and social science disciplines. This annual meeting was a follow up of the previous one held on May 2018 at Washington D.C., USA.

After issuing the recent dry season water-crop forecasts in September 2019, the team of Ethnographers and Social Scientists were heavily involved in the field (Ethiopia) for disseminating the forecast bulletins. In the process, they met with various stakeholder groups to assess their primary feedback, as well as the implementing agencies to justify the socio-technical viability of the provided information. All these information lead to the understanding of several existing ways of future improvements, which could play pivotal roles in the coming forecasts (wet and dry seasons of 2020). Much of the discussions happening in this PIRE Annual Meeting included fruitful exchange of these ideas. It was a two-day event – the first day included presentations on project progress, tasks and way forward; research updates on weather-hydro-crop models; updates on social investigations, household and community surveys and other data collection processes; updates on the economic model and ABM; motivation and challenges behind the development of the seasonal forecasts; integration of different models in the process; progress and fact-findings on the UConn-Bahir Dar University (BDU) collaboration for the PIRE-Citizen Science Initiative; and last, updates on the PIRE-app (e-PING) and database. These presentations were followed by intense Q&A sessions where participants voice their opinions to highlight several important facts, as well as issues and challenges related to the forecast development – which are deemed crucial for smooth design of the project.

The second day’s floor was mostly discussions to support free flowing exchange of knowledge. This included PI meetings, Graduate Student Brownbags, and discussions on some other important outreach topics, namely, Forecast Dissemination – Reflections and Improvements; and Practical/ Ethical Considerations for Surveys and Ethnographic Data Sharing. The day concluded with three different round-table discussions focusing on three interesting inter-disciplinary research ideas. The three ideas selected were, 1) approach of the seasonal forecast communication, 2) crop yield forecasting using analog and statistical approaches, and 3) improved water management to improve the fairness of water allocation. Interestingly, these three round table discussions further conceptualized some additional research ideas connecting different environmental resources, and different research disciplines.

One of the hot topics of the PIRE Annual Meeting was structuring ways to improve the next forecast to be issued during the wet season of 2020. Based on the recent experience to disseminate forecasts at field level, the Ethnographers realized that some of the information shared in the forecast bulletin are hard to grasp from the farmers perspective, and in many cases the farmers have a far more simplified yet pragmatic way of understanding scientifically complicated terms. Considering this, it was widely discussed to further re-assess putting information on some of the soil parameters (soil moisture, for example, is hard for the farmers to physically understand in terms of the scientific units prescribed) in the forecast bulletin. Another important finding was the idea to introduce two different forecasts in the wet season (tentative issuing dates could be March and May 2020), focusing on two different cropping cycles. This could mean higher forecast accuracy with a better efficiency. Moreover, there were also discussions about the next dry season forecast in 2020. The dry season forecast provided for this irrigation season contained only a single irrigation scenario outcome, which was to some extent, plain and simple. However, given the better understanding and performances of the land-surface, groundwater and crop models in future, it is widely expected that an optimum release scenario can be envisaged ahead of time. Based on the feedback from the field, it was agreed that this could be a very useful information.

The complete report of the PIRE 3^rd Annual Meeting, November 2019, is currently in preparation and will soon be uploaded in the website!