Yesterday launched the first day of the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP18) for the UNFCCC. Already, references to agriculture have been made at the Subsidiary Body on Scientific and Technical Advice (SBSTA), with adaptation needs carrying considerable weight especially in developing countries. Adaptation is also the topic of today’s blog post from Bioversity International (cross-posted on their website), discusses the role of seeds in filling those needs. Better adapted and more diverse seeds are a critical component to a climate-smart landscape, and serve the essential function of building reslience to such shocks as droughts.
Within the framework of Seeds for Needs, Bioversity International has launched a joint project with national partners Mekelle University and Sirinka Agricultural Research Centre and the Italian Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna aiming to understand how the genetic diversity of durum wheat can support farmers facing climate change.
Climate change is adversely affecting the food security and livelihoods of the people from the poorest regions of the world, who are least able to combat the changes. In light of the changing climate, many crops that were once mainstays for food and income of populations are experiencing smaller yields of less nutritious value, forcing people further into poverty, food insecurity and hunger.
Seeds for Needs, an initiative led by Bioversity International and partners, helps Ethiopian farming communities to use valuable plant genetic resources to reduce the vulnerability of crops to changing weather patterns.
“In Seeds for Needs, farmers play a key role because not only do we need seeds that are adapted to the environment, but we also need seeds that meet farmers’ needs,” says Carlo Fadda, senior scientist at Bioversity International and coordinator of Seeds for Needs in East Africa.
Lack of information and access to durum—one of the major crops of Ethiopia—seeds of better-adapted varieties leaves many Ethiopian smallholder farmers vulnerable to increased food insecurity. The required diversity and traits, in the form of more than 3,000 durum wheat accessions, are available in the national genebank held by the Institute of Biodiversity Conservation. Seeds for Needs is working to bridge the gap between farmers’ lack of access to seeds and the abundance of accessions in genebanks by providing locally-adapted seeds that are able to meet future conditions of unpredictable rainfall and changes in temperature.
A new project of the Seeds for Needs initiative
The project is taking place in the Tigray Region in Northern Ethiopia and will allow farmers to evaluate promising local varieties of durum wheat and, with Bioversity International, assess how genetic diversity can provide an effective strategy to adapt to climate change.
Firstly, the project focuses on understanding what climate change issues farmers are facing and if the agricultural diversity they are using at the moment is enough to cope with climatic stresses. Through focus group discussions farmers identified traits that are important to them and discovered the limits of the varieties they are currently using. Participating farmers expressed interest in wheat varieties grown in trial fields and said it would be helpful for them to be able to test some of the varieties in their fields. As a result, next year, a selection of 40-50 wheat varieties, that scored the highest, will be tested in the farmers’ own fields.
“We will closely monitor the benefit of increased diversity in farmers’ fields. This is possible thanks to Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna that will do molecular characterization of the durum wheat accessions and with Mekelle University and Sirinka Agricultural Research Centre that have brought their linkages and infrastructure and experience in phenotypic characterization and in working with farmers’ communities”, continues Fadda.
“I am very excited about this initiative. This is a breakthrough in Seeds for Needs for two main reasons: for the magnitude of the project and the link between the molecular and phenotypic characterization [of durum wheat] to farmers’ preferences. We have tested 400 accessions of durum wheat which have all been evaluated by farmers, so the scale [of this project] is much broader than the previous one,” says Fadda.
Beyond seeds and scaling up such efforts, there is plenty of going on around agriculture at COP18 over the next week and a half. Make sure to stay turned here on the Landscape Blog, and also follow along on the Agriculture Day Blog (which featured climate-smart landscapes last week!). #COP18, #ALLForest, and @agricultureday to follow along on Twitter.
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