Guest speaker at UConn, Dr. Belay Simane
Dr. Belay Simane from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia is scheduled to deliver a lecture at UConn on January 24, 2017. The talk is entitled, “Building Resilience at the Community Level in Africa: the Role of Climate Smart Villages for Green Growth.” The event is sponsored by UConn PIRE and all are welcome.
Date: January 24, 2017, 12:00-1:00 pm
Location: Harry G. Manchester Hall, Room 344
Climate change and food security are two of the most pressing challenges in Africa and the continent has a long history of failed agricultural development projects. A major reason for these failures is that proposed solutions to development often follow a top-down approach: they are introduced by international organizations and approaches are developed in other cultural and agroecological contexts. Alternatively, they are imposed by government authorities in an attempt to promote large-scale adoption of favored practices. Recognition of the above shortcomings is the basis for launching the ongoing work in Ethiopia that focuses on the problem of agro-ecosystem based “climate-smart landscape management,” prioritizing adaptation measures to achieve food security, reduce land degradation, and improve water management.
Establishing climate smart villages (CSV) aims to meet the goals of increasing agricultural productivity and smallholder farmer incomes while enabling adaptation and resilience to climate change and reducing emissions along the way. For small scale subsistence farmers, it’s a way of doing agricultural development that uses resources efficiently and wisely so as to reduce the high level of risk threatening their livilihoods. Resilience strategies are tailored in collaboration with communities, rather than one-size-fits-all, and there is enormous scope for farmer-to-farmer learning and a great potential for scaling up CSVs.
Categories: News
Published: January 4, 2017