Enhancing Capacities Of The AgMIP South Asia Regional Teams Through Capacity-Building Workshops and Knowledge-Sharing Platforms.

Agricultural systems are sensitive to extreme climatic events such as droughts and floods, delayed monsoon onset, intermittent dry spells and heat waves and changing climate increases frequency of these events within the growing period.  The impact of these events is felt by regional agricultural systems differently based upon their climate, environment and socio economic conditions. To mitigate this, world agriculture sector find it necessary to adapt and adopt new technologies to maintain economic, environmental and social sustainability thereby achieve Global food security to satisfy the demands from future population projected as 9 billion by 2050.

Although there are many initiatives in progress to address impacts of climate change all over the world but there are none (or) very few focusing on analysing impacts of climate variability and change through a transdisciplinary effort that consistently linking state-of-the-art climate scenarios to crop and economic models. 

The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) is such initiative at global level linking climate, crop, and economic modeling communities with cutting-edge information technology to produce improved crop and economic models and the next generation of climate impact projections for the agricultural sector. The stated goal of AgMIP is to improve substantially the characterization of world food security due to climate change and to enhance adaptation capacity in both developing and developed countries.

For effective execution of AgMIP activities require aggregation of crop model outputs as inputs to regional and global economic models to determine regional vulnerabilities, changes in comparative advantage, price effects, and potential adaptation strategies in the agricultural sector.  The Global AgMIP team and regional research teams effectively organize and execute research activities according to geographic region and specific crops for developing Representative Agricultural Pathways (RAPs) to enable testing climate change adaptations in the context of other global trends. 

The AgMIP South Asia Coordination Research Team (SA-CRT) ensures enhancing capacities of South Asia AgMIP Regional Research Teams in coordination with AgMIP Global team.  The main goals of AgMIP South Asia CRT team is to (1) build capacity of the multi-disciplinary Research Teams throughout the region to prepare integrated assessments of climate change impacts and adaptation; and also (2) design workshops, in collaboration with the AgMIP Global Team, to publish the results of the integrated assessments that each Research Team has put together during the project.  In addition, the SA-CRT also aims to develop knowledge-sharing platforms so as to facilitate learning exchanges among and across the various AgMIP regional teams of South Asia and also ensure the national systems and various stakeholders utilizing the benefits of AgMIP research results.

In this paper the authors present how innovative capacity building and knowledge sharing platforms contributing to (1) enhance capacities of AgMIP RRTs as well as national agriculture and natural resource management agencies (2) outreach and dissemination through knowledge products and knowledge platforms and (3) engagement and coordination of stakeholders.