New Brief Explores Building Climate Resilience from the Ground Up in Ghana
February 13, 2023 - To get the information they need to make crucial farming decisions, like when to plant or harvest, smallholder farmers often rely on what experts call “indigenous ecological indicators,” or IEIs. (Think bird, insect, and wind patterns, or the movements of the sun and moon.) But how accurate are these traditional “forecasts,” especially in an age of extreme climate variability?
The answer? Not accurate enough. That’s just one of the insights, gleaned from farmers and other agricultural producers themselves, that is driving the work of a groundbreaking USAID effort to boost climate resilience in Ghana. The activity, managed by the Feed the Future Policy LINK program, is taking a bottom-up approach to implementing key recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—including on the importance of reliable data in climate forecasting.
That’s the subject of a new Policy LINK brief, “Increasing Smallholder Farmers’ Resilience through Improved Climate Information Services in Ghana.”
