A research project entitled “Adaptation to increase resilience to climate change in Ethiopian agriculture: empowering farmers to adopt the right water management technologies for their farms” is to be conducted in Ethiopia, commencing May 2014.
The research proposal was submitted to the International Development Research Center (IDRC) and has already been approved. This research will take place in Ethiopia by well versed experts from various disciplines, mainly economists and natural scientists. The principal researcher is Dr. Alemu Mekonnen, Associate Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, Addis Ababa University (AAU) and Senior Research Fellow at the Environmental Economics Policy Forum for Ethiopia (EEPFE) based at Ethiopian Development Research Institute (EDRI).
The general objective of the project is to improve resilience of small-scale farmers to climate change by enabling them to adopt appropriate water management technologies.
More specifically, the project aims at enhancing the adaptation capacity by analyzing the profitability and efficacy of combinations of various soil and water management technologies as well as key barriers for optimal adaptation by building on and analyzing an existing panel data set from the Blue Nile Basin that has a focus on climate change in small-scale agriculture.
In the course of the project, a number of deliverables will be produced, such as, peer reviewed publications, policy briefs and seminar presentations.
The findings from the project will be directly implementable in currently on-going governmental programs, such as the Climate Resilient Green Economy (CRGE) strategy and the 2nd phase of the Sustainable Land Management (SLM) sector program. The project will include capacity building through post doc, PhD and MSc students as well as training of farmers and extension agents. Furthermore, the methodological approaches and findings will have an impact far beyond Ethiopia through publications in peer reviewed journals and dissemination by the Environment for Development (EfD) initiative.
The project will benefit greatly from the data and other resources made available at the Water and Land Resource Center (WLRC) - Addis Ababa University that receives core support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). The main analytical work will be done by researchers and students at EEPFE/EDRI and AAU (WLRC and Department of Economics). The project will have a very strong academic backstopping through research collaborations with senior researchers at Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California at Berkeley; Department of Economics, University of Geneva and Environment for Development Initiative, Department of Economics at University of Gothenburg, which are the participating institutions.
It is a three-year project that will end in May 2017.