Background

Agriculture is vital for food and nutrition security, natural resource management, and economic development, and it remains central to the livelihoods of millions of Ethiopians. However, the country’s agriculture is not immune to the many afflictions affecting the sector, including ecosystem degradation, supply chain disruptions for inputs, the COVID-19 pandemic, financial tightening through rising interest rates and global conflicts and related risks.

Moreover, this critical sector is also impacted by the vagaries of climate variability and change. In some of Ethiopia’s most vulnerable communities, extreme weather and climate variability are disastrously affecting agricultural productivity and food and nutrition security. Frequent droughts, floods, emerging pests, and disease outbreaks are becoming critical challenges that smallholder farmers and livestock keepers must contend with in this age of climate crisis.

Without serious strategies to build resilience and address climate adaptation, people living in the climate hotspots will become ever more vulnerable. Recognizing these significant development challenges of our time, Ethiopia and its strategic development partners have designed several strategic initiatives to adapt to climate change and transform its agriculture and food systems. Although the current actions to build resilience to climate change and related shocks across Ethiopia’s agriculture and food systems are promising, they are not nearly enough to meet the scale of the problem.

About the event

The Ethiopian government has recently convened a national conference on ‘Shaping Agriculture for Greater Impact’ to map the path forward in a renewed commitment towards agricultural transformation through resilient agriculture and food systems. These include forging innovative partnerships, public policy, food value chain and livelihood, and on-farm and productive landscape solutions.

This gathering is part of the high-level conference series co-hosted by the Ethiopia’s Ministry of Agriculture and Ethiopia’s Agricultural Transformation Institute in collaboration with AICCRA-Ethiopia, hosted at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), and expected accelerate the integration of CGIAR and its national and international partners - to improve livelihoods and build agri-food system resilience and adaptive capacity to changing climate.

(i) Through sharing of science, knowledge, and innovations and climate-informed digital agriculture data hubs and decision support to address critical gaps in climate information services CIS), NextGen seasonal and sub seasonal forecasts, early warning systems (EWS) for early action (EA) and climate smart agriculture (CSA) technologies and provisions, and to promote large-scale core-country and cross-border/regional adoption including via South-South learnings,

(ii) Build capacity/multi-actor partnerships for delivery – education-research-extension continuum - to anticipate climate risks, enhance preparedness and accelerate prioritization, user-centric bundling and uptake of best-bet resilience building and adaptive measures, and

(iii) Contextualize CIS, EWS/EA, climate-informed digital ag-advisories, CSA link bundled packages to transfer systems for scaling, and improve beneficiaries and end-users’ access to CIS and ag-advisories for decision making.

Contributors

• Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture (MoA)
• Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Institute (ATI)
• International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)
• Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA-Ethiopia)