Twenty officers and field technical staff from several ministries – agriculture, forestry, environment and resources, planning, development, finance and national research institutes recently gathered in Chisamba to discuss climate change.
The five day training zoomed on the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) for Climate Change Adaptation in agriculture.
Organised by FAO, UNDP and the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), the workshop’s key activities was supporting agriculture sector through the Integrating Agriculture in National Adaptation Plan Programme (NAP-Ag).
NAP-Ag is an initiative funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB) through its International Climate Initiative (IKI).
The main purpose of the training workshop was to strengthen capacity of technical staff and decision makers on the practical use of CBA, as applied to adaptation options in agriculture.
Participants were guided on how CBA can be used to broaden and improve the decision making process while dealing with climate change variability and uncertainty.
Throughout the workshop, theoretical foundations of CBA applied to climate change were constantly intertwined to hands-on sessions, group works and real data exercises on Excel.
The learning-by-doing approach was considered a key driver for increasing awareness on practical challenges related to well-grounded quantitative analysis as well as the challenges and opportunities climate change poses to rural farming in Zambia.
Participants observed that economic and financial analysis will help assessing project viability and guide project selection especially at design stage’
In addition, the participants said the CBA is an important analysis to know before understanding any project to reduce wastage of resources
The NAP-Ag Programme believes that training workshops are effective tools to increasing awareness and technical capacity of local institutions on integrating climate change concerns into relevant national and sectoral plans.
