Climate change adaptation in agriculture & natural resource management


Impressions from the 2014 course in Uganda


From 3-14 February 2014 The Centre for Development Innovation (Wageningen UR) and the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, Makerere University, Kampala organised for the fourth time their climate change adaptation course. Participants came from all over the world, from Africa, Asia and Latin America, in total from 19 countries.


Although starting in a rather formal environment,

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the participants quickly started to enjoy the multicultural setting of the course and discussed issues in a more informal way.

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There was quite some time dedicated for field work. Farmers explained well what they undertook in order to cope with climate change.

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Question is of course, what climate change will bring for this young boy and his baby-brother. We met them during our field work. Will they be able to adapt to climate change and could we technicians and professionals assist them?

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We saw some nice water harvesting measures developed by the farmers,

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and sometimes we found nice examples of alternative use of materials.

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Farmers do their utmost to adapt to climate change, but they are now largely restricted to work with their family, their clan or in other small groups.

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What we did not see so much were organisations at somewhat higher levels in order to deal with climate change and upcoming drought.

In the group work we paid much more attention to interventions on a somewhat bigger scale, at municipal, watershed and landscape levels.

One of the groups of participants studied possibilities to deal with climate change in Nepal, where  because of melting, glacier lakes might cause serious damage.

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Many colleagues from Makerere university gave interesting presentations

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Fortunately there was also some time for relaxation and we visited a nice performance of the Ndere dancing group.

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The participants also actively participated in the organisation of a seminar, for which they prepared several recommendations. These were presented to the Makerere University community and interested people from outside.
On the last they the participants presented the  result of their group work and their plans about future individual actions.

For this course programme the following three objectives are mentioned:

•    Participants of this course will have full understanding of climate change adaptation concepts.
•    They are able to effectively and meaningfully contribute to the debate on climate change adaptation, either in the policy process and/or in providing knowledge to the policy process.
•    They will strengthen their positions in these processes on the basis of newly acquired concepts, skills and methodologies.

During the final evaluation the participants scored for the completion of these objectives
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The rate of completion of the objectives was above 50% with a mean around 75%. This was considered satisfactory by both participants and course coordinators.

Arend Jan van Bodegom, course coordinator

If you are excited about this course and you wish to participate in next years' edition of 'Climate change adaptation in agriculture and natural resource management', please visit our website for more information. Click here