Building resilience to drought in the Sahel by early risk identification and advices

Abstract

Agriculture in the Sahel region is characterized by traditional techniques and is strongly dependent on climatic conditions and rainfall. As a consequence of recurrent droughts in East and West Africa, integrated famine Early Warning Systems (EWS) have been established in order to produce and disseminate coherent and integrated information for prevention and management of food crises. Since the early 1990s, analysis tools and simulation models based on satellite meteorological data have been developed to support Multidisciplinary Working Groups (MWG) in cropping season monitoring. However, many of these tools are now obsolete from the IT perspective or ineffective due to unavailability of regularly updated meteorological data. To ensure a long-term sustainability of operational systems for drought risk zones identification CNR-IBIMET has developed 4Crop, a coherent Open Source web-based Spatial Data Infrastructure to treat all input and output data in an interoperable, platform-independent and uniform way. The 4Crop system has been conceived as a multipurpose tool in order to provide different categories of stakeholder, from farmers to policy makers, with effective and useful information for climate risk reduction and drought resilience improvement. Advice to farmers is a fundamental component of prevention that can allow a better adaptation of traditional cropping systems to climatic variability. Past experiences show that agro-meteorological information and weather forecasts can play a key role for food security, reducing the vulnerability of farmers, strengthening rural production systems and increasing crop yields. A participatory and cross-disciplinary approach is essential to build farmers’ trust and to develop effective integration between scientific and local knowledge to increase the rate of dissemination and utilization of advice.