FAO Digital Media Hub - FAO, IFAD, WFP on Climate Change

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FAO, IFAD, WFP on Climate Change

COP21, also known as the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, will, for the first time in over 20 years of UN negotiations, aim to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, with the aim of keeping global warming below 2°C. Climate change threatens to derail efforts to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, which the international community has committed to doing by 2030 under Sustainable Development Goal 2. As the COP21 begins in Paris, this joint-UN agency feed provides footage from field projects tackling the impact of climate change on agriculture and farmers.

Agriculture has a major role to play in responding to climate change. A paradigm shift towards agriculture and food systems that are more resilient, more productive and more sustainable is required. While temperature rises pose a real threat to global food production, investments in all sectors of agriculture can simultaneously support climate change adaptation and mitigation while improving rural people’s livelihoods. Programmes implemented by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) include the Transboundary Agro-ecosystem Management Project for the Kagera River Basin in Eastern Africa.

In Eastern Kenya, rainfall has become unpredictable and the dry season stretches for increasingly longer periods. Only two per cent of people here have enough food all year round. The predominant crop, maize, needs a lot of water and three out of four maize harvests fail. With investments from the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the European Union, researchers have identified sorghum as a more suitable crop for the changing climate. Now they just have to convince the farmers to make the switch.

The current El Niño is one of the strongest on the record and its impact on food security illustrates the need to increase investment in disaster risk reduction, early warning, climate change adaptation and resilience building. The UN World Food Programme (WFP) is closely monitoring the current El Niño and preparing for its possible impact on food production. Over the next 12 months, El Niño could potentially affect the food security of a large number of already vulnerable people who depend on agriculture and livestock for their livelihood in Central America, most of Sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia.

Country Tanzania

Duration 9m40s

Edit Version Clean

Video Type B Roll Video

Date 11/26/2015 10:37 AM

File size 1.58 GB

Unique ID UF2T5K

All editorial uses permitted

Production details and shotlist

UNFAO Source FAO Video

Shotlist FAO’s TRANSBOUNDARY AGRO-ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT PROJECT IN THE KAGERA RIVER BASIN

LOCATIONS: KAGERA RIVER BASIN in RWANDA and TANZANIA

SHOT: July 2015

SOUND: Natural sound, English

TRT: 3’30”

SOURCE: FAO

ACCESS: ALL

SHOTLIST:

1. Details of rain on the ground

2. Wide shopt of landscape / Various / Rwanda

3. Various of fishing, farming and herding, Rwanda

4. Wide shot of landscape / Various / Rwanda

5. Various of Farmer Field School / Karambo village, Rwanda

6. SOT Clemente Twahirwa, Agroforestry Field Officer (English): We introduced terraces, water trapping pits, anti-erosion ditches, as a way of retaining water and increase production. We also introduced 1,000 cooking stoves specialized in reducing consumption of fire wood.

7. Various of woman collecting fire wood and using energy saving cooking stove. / Kirushya village, Rwanda

8. Various of women laying dry grass on the soil and watering it (mulching). / Kirushya village, Rwanda

9. Various of man-made ponds and farmers. Gakindo village, Rwanda.

10. Close up of group of women.

11. Wide shot of landscape / Various / Tanzania

12. Various of herders with cattle / Nyirarubomboza, Tanzania

13. SOT Martin Frick, FAO Director of Climate, Energy and Tenure Division (English): At the core of the Conference of the Parties is basically that people of course want to address climate change and want to make sure that global warming stays within a limit that you can still manage, but at the same time, countries want to work on lifting their population out of poverty. We have to combine these two things and climate finance is at the heart of it. Our advocacy goal as FAO is really to convince the State Parties about the central importance of investing in agriculture to address rural poverty, food security, climate change adaptation and mitigation, all at the same time.

14. Various of Magereza primary school with children working on demo plots / Magereza, Tanzania

IFAD in KENYA: CLIMATE CHANGE AND SORGHUM

LOCATION: MAKUENI DISTRICT, KENYA

SHOT: October, 2015

SOUND: Natural sound, Swahili, English, Natural sound

TRT: 3’30”

SOURCE: IFAD

ACCESS: ALL

SHOTLIST:

1. Wide shot dry landscape

2. Medium shot dry landscape

3. Wide shot Kids looking out of shack

4. Close up pot boiling on fire

5. Close up kids looking out of shack behind smoke from fire

6. Wide shot Jennifer Kilongosi ploughing with oxen

7. Close up Jennifer Kilongosi

8. Medium shot Jennifer Kilongosi ploughing with oxen

9. Close up plough

10. SOT Jennifer Kilongosi, Farmer (Swahili): When I was a young girl the river would not dry up so quickly but the climate has changed and now after two months of dry season we have to dig for water. We have to always dig deeper and deeper to access to the water. These are worrying times, especially for future generations who will find it harder and harder because rain is more and more rare.

11. Wide shot Jennifer Kilongosi scooping water from hole

12. Wide shot Jennifer Kilongosi exiting hole with water bucket

13. Zoom out sorghum field

14. Medium shot researcher walking through sorghum field

15. Close up researcher’s hand on sorghum

16. Close up sorghum in field

17. Wide shot researcher in sorghum demonstration plot

18. Medium shot researcher in sorghum demonstration plot

19. Tilt up from sorghum plant to researcher

20. Wide shot women at sorghum cooking demonstration

21. Medium shot women eating at sorghum cooking demonstration

22. SOT Jennifer Kilongosi, Farmer (Swahili): I never grew sorghum before. I thought it was just a waste of time. But as soon as I was educated about the benefits I started growing it myself.

23. Wide shot Jennifer Kilongosi cleaning sorghum

24. Close up Jennifer Kilongosi cleaning sorghum

25. Close up sorghum

26. Wide shot Jennifer Kilongosi with children in school uniform

27. Close up children in school uniform

28. Jennifer Kilongosi and children walk into house

29. Wide shot farmers sowing seeds in field

30. Close up farmer putting fertiliser in field

31. Close up pickaxing in field

32. Wide shot Margarita Astralaga watching demonstration of plough while supervising project

33. Close up plough

34. Medium shot Margarita Astrala talking during project supervision

35. SOT Margarita Astralaga, Director, IFAD Environment and Climate Change Division (Eng-lish): We need to keep investing in the crops and the seeds and the varieties that will be able to resist these changes as they become more evident.

EL NINO IN 2015 COULD BE THE MOST SEVER ON RECORD, WFP WARNS THAT IT MAY CAUSE WIDESPREAD GLOBAL HUNGER

LOCATIONS:

ZIMBABWE (Oct. 2015), SOMALIA (Oct. 2015), GUATEMALA (Aug. 2015), FRENCH GUIANA (June 2015)

SOUND: Natural sound, Shona, English

TRT: 2’40’’

SOURCE: WFP

ACCESS: ALL

SHOTLIST:

1. Sasula District, Zimbabwe: Woman Farmers working the in field

2. SOT: Priscilla Mudyanavana, 36 years old, farmer, married with three children (Shona):

This season was very hard because of lack of rain. We hoped there would be rain for our fields but there was none.

3. Europe’s spaceport, Kourou, French Guiana (European Space Agency footage):

Countdown and launch of Sentinel 2

4. Animated rendition of Sentinel 2 in space scanning the earth (European Space Agency ani-mation)

5. Rome, Italy. SOT Rogerio Bonifacio, WFP VAM (Vulnerability Assessments and Mapping) officer (English):

This year’s el Niño is likely to be one of the worst on record. What it will do is to push a lot of people who are on edge in a way, and it will push them into a status where they will need as-sistance from WFP and that is going to happen at a large geographical scale from Central America, to southern Africa to East Africa and that is going to push our capacity to respond to new levels.

6. Jowhar, Somalia: Convoy of WFP trucks driving in drought stricken area, unloading WFP food.

7. River Shebelle, Somalia: WFP boats preparing for floods.

8. San Antonio Ilotenango, Guatemala: Drought damaged corn crops / farmers in a religious procession praying for rain.

ENDS

Script The Kagera River Basin in East Africa occupies a strategic position on the borders of four countries: Burundi, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda. Good management of the Kagera water flow regime is vital for maintaining the water levels of Lake Victoria and outflow to the River Nile.

More than 16 million people live here, and most of them depend on farming, herding and fishing for survival. But the area’s natural resources are under pressure from population growth, unsustainable land use and management, and climate change and variability.

FAO’s Transboundary Agro-ecosystem Management Project is introducing a new approach to protect the River Basin and the productivity of its inhabitants.

Farmer field schools teach farmers how to make the best of Rwanda’s hilly terrain by using sustainable land and water management techniques. Even the simplest methods, such as planting trees or laying dry grass over soil to retain moisture (mulching) can increase productivity and protect the environment. FAO’s project helped a group of 30 farmers in Gakindo village install a system of pipes and man-made ponds that allows them to grow plentiful crops even during the dry season.

In Tanzania, the Kagera project is helping livestock herders face the challenge of land degradation caused by overgrazing. At Magareza primary school, children learn how to grow cassava and bananas on demo plots, using simple soil management techniques that allow trees to help retain moisture from the rain and reduce the wind. And the benefits go even beyond, as the children pass this knowledge to their parents, who can start using them on their farms.

Martin Frick, Director of Climate, Energy and Tenure Division at FAO in Rome, underlines the importance of investing in agriculture in order to address rural poverty, food security, climate change adaptation and mitigation, all at the same time.

In semi-arid eastern Kenya, rainfall has become unpredictable and the dry season stretches for increasingly longer periods. Only two per cent of people here have enough food throughout the year, and almost half the children under five years old are malnourished. The predominant crop, maize, needs a lot of water and most farmers, like Jennifer Kilongosi, have had only one good maize harvest in the past four years...a consequence, says Jennifer, of climate change.

“When I was a young girl the river would not dry up so quickly but the climate has changed and now after two months of dry season we have to dig for water. We have to always dig deeper and deeper to access to the water. These are worrying times, especially for future generations who will find it harder and harder because rain is more and more rare,” she says.

With investments from the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the European Union, researchers have been looking at crops that can withstand dry conditions to help farmers adapt to the changing weather patterns. Through that research they identified sorghum as a far more suitable crop for the changing climate. Sorghum grows in areas where many other crops can’t, because it can tolerate high levels of heat and drought. It not only needs about half the amount of water that maize does, but it’s also highly nutritious for animals and humans.

But it wasn’t so easy to convince farmers to make the switch from maize, even after the researchers developed a higher yielding variety of sorghum. So the researchers planted demonstration plots, created commercial linkages with animal feed companies and have been encouraging people to eat sorghum with cooking demonstrations.

“I never grew sorghum before. I thought it was just a waste of time. But as soon as I was educated about the benefits I started growing it myself,” says Jennifer Kilongosi.

Since she started growing sorghum, Jennifer is earning an income for the first time. Now she can pay the children’s school fees and feed her family nutritious food throughout the year.

Jennifer is just one of a hundred thousand farmers in Kenya and Tanzania who are now growing sorghum. Margarita Astralaga, the director of the Environment and Climate Change Division at IFAD says that continued investments in research are the best way to respond to a changing climate. “We need to keep investing in the crops and the seeds and the varieties that will be able to resist these changes as they become more evident,” she says.

At least 1.5 million people are estimated to be facing food insecurity in Zimbabwe following a poor harvest in April caused by prolonged dry spells during the growing season. The south has been par-ticularly badly affected. Farmers are now preparing their land with a view to planting their crops this month. They are waiting for decent rain but there are fears that the El Niño weather phenomenon will bring yet another season of drought.

In partnership with the European Space Agency, WFP will use data from Sentinel-2 to monitor the effects of climactic changes in agricultural and pastoral areas . This will help WFP plan and respond to climactic events and conditions that can cause poor harvests and hunger. Designed as a two-satellite mission, Sentinel-2 will provide imagery on a five-day revisit cycle once its twin, Sentinel-2B, is launched in 2016.

Sentinel 2 is a polar-orbiting, multispectral high-resolution imaging mission for land monitoring to provide, for example, imagery of vegetation, soil and water cover, inland waterways and coastal ar-eas. Its camera sensor has been designed to detect very specific wavelengths of light that detail the health of plants.

In Somalia, El Nino has triggered drought in north western Somalia, and is expected to cause mas-sive flooding in the southern and central areas. Somaliland is already seeing one of the driest years in memory: severe shortages of food and water, and the deaths of livestock of herders have plunged over 10,000 families into destitution. For those suffering from drought – WFP the regional govern-ment and partners will provide 60,000 drought-affected people with electronic transfers to allow them to purchase food. Ahead of expected flooding, WFP is currently pre-positioning food, includ-ing High Energy Biscuits, and nutrition products in the main areas expected to see an influx of peo-ple, among them Beletweyne, Jowhar, Balcad and Afgoye.

In Central America’s “Dry Corridor”, a prolonged dry spell severely affected crops in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua in 2014 causing significant losses, especially in the Dry Corridor – a drought-prone area shared by the four countries. In 2015, another dry spell, exacerbated by El Niño caused significant harvest losses for small producers. More than 65 percent of households in the Dry Corridor had no food stocks left by the start of the 2015 Primera season. An Emergency Food Security Assessment (EFSA) carried out by WFP and partners between May and July 2015 reported that some 4.2 million people have been affected by the current drought and approximately 2.3 million are food insecure. Guatemala reported losses between 50 percent and 100 percent for maize and beans in the Dry Corridor. According to FAO, this corresponds to a loss of US$82.6 mil-lion in maize production. Honduras reported a 96 percent loss in maize, 87 percent in beans, and a 19 percent decrease in the amount of sorghum produced in the Dry Corridor.

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