Evaluating agricultural weather and climate services in Africa: Evidence, methods, and a learning agenda
By C. Vaughan, James Hansen, P. Roudier, P. Watkiss, E. Carr. WIREs Climate Change, 2019
126 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Weather and climate services (WCS) are expected to improve the capacity of Africa's agricultural sector to manage the risks of climate variability and change. Despite this, a lack of evidence prevents a realistic analysis of whether such services are delivering on their potential. This paper reviews 66 studies that have evaluated outcomes and/or impacts of agricultural WCS in Africa, highlighting areas that have received relatively more attention as well as persistent gaps. While the evaluation of WCS outcomes is relatively straightforward, estimates of the number of people who access and use these services are uneven (covering a small number of communities in 23 of 54 African countries) and highly variable (with access estimates ranging from ~2 to 86%, depending on the service and the population). Meanwhile, 22 documents estimate the impact of WCS with respect to yields and/or income. Developed with a variety of methods, these estimates are also wide ranging and illustrate how impact is conditioned on a number of characteristics of the service, the user, and the context in which both operate. The paper uses lessons developed through this review to develop a “learning agenda,” or evidence‐building roadmap, to establish priorities that can guide work to improve the design, delivery, and impact of agricultural WCS in Africa. Priority learning areas include activities that can strengthen the evidence of access, use, and impacts of WCS, along with those that can advance the use and usability of evidence so as to improve the design and targeting of WCS services.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d2d377d6a0a7423029ee03c6c01bdaa55f4ab3e2
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Global and Planetary Change
In Soil Science
Citations in the corpus
- Food and Earth Systems: Priorities for Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation for Agriculture and Food Systems (2019, background): “A recent Africa-focused review of published evidence on CIS for farmers found considerable variability in rates of access, but in most cases (with exceptions that include women farmers in Mali, and pastoralists) the majority of farmers who access CIS use it in their decision-making [53].”