This research contract between the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computing Sciences of the University of Cantabria (UC) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations is aimed at developing a comprehensive climate change rationale which will help FAO Tanzania, in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture of Tanzania and other national Ministries, Agencies and Departments to build a project proposal on enhancing the resilience to climate change of smallholder farmers along the Lake Victoria Basin. This proposal will be later submitted to the Green Climate Fund (https://www.greenclimate.fund) with the objective of obtaining the technical and catalytic investment required to implement interlinked components anchored into addressing fundamental challenges that hinder climate resilience actions to be carried out in the targeted areas.
For this to be feasible, UC will develop an in-depth analysis of historical climate trends and future climate projections (up to 2100) under varying emission scenarios building on an ensemble of state-of-the-art high-resolution regional climate models. To overcome the intrinsic limitations that prevent from a direct use of their outputs (e.g. the presence of systematic errors), these models will be properly adjusted/corrected by means of several statistical techniques in order for them to reliably reproduce the historical climate of the target region. This will in turn allow for a robust assessment of the climate change impact on selected agro-ecosystems, crops and socio-economic activities at a fine spatial resolution. In the long-term, the results from this project are expected to contribute to build and establish new approaches for sustainable climate resilient practices in Tanzania’s agriculture.
