Working day to day over decades on their farms, farmers are the first to notice local change. With climate change ongoing and accelerating, its impacts are no strangers to the farmers. They observe shifts in rainfall timing, hotter dry spells, and changing pest patterns long before these signals appear in headlines. To complement this lived experience and be useful for future-orientated decision making, tools like ACLIMATAR need to connect to day-to-day realities, building trust and serving as conversational tools.
Inevitability, mean speaking about farm management, about harvest schemes, and pest pressure, climate change will come up. By providing future projections alongside current and past trends, ACLIMATAR puts its data into frames that can be mapped against farmers’ field experience – comparing the observed changes with the data in the platform. Turning towards the future, ACLIMATAR allows to move beyond extrapolation of past trends – which become less and less reliable as the Earth’s climate system is turned upside down. Rather, using model based approaches it provides a projection of a possible climatic future – a starting point for any discussion around how to prepare.
ACLIMATAR does not prescribe solutions. Instead, it brings crop-specific projections, seasonality analyses and risk indicators into the same frame as farmers’ own knowledge, making future change tangible and discussable. By combining what people see in their fields with modeled trends, the platform helps to move from anecdote to structured reflection: Which changes are already evident? Which trends are likely to intensify? Where might the most pressing vulnerabilities be next decade? This triangulation - local observation, modeled projections and practical experience- creates a richer basis for deciding what to try, test or monitor on the ground.
Visuals from the platform, properly explained, help to guide the conversations. Farmers and local stakeholders compare their recent observations against the platform’s charts of temperature and precipitation, as well as change maps of agro-climatic suitability. Thereby, ACLIMATAR facilitates collective sense-making.
Discussions then may shift towards practical choices: adjustments in shade or pruning regimes? Timing of planting and harvesting, or changing varieties may be adaptation practices worth trialing – to start preparing for the changes to come. These are not one-size-fits-all prescriptions but ACLIMATAR provides the long list to start acting on farm, community and landscape level. The shared view from cooperative teams, extension services and mixed stakeholder groups and the collective sense-making then makes it easier to then plan small experiments, set monitoring priorities, or seek targeted support from partners, prioritizing steps that are realistic and locally appropriate.
Did we spark your interest? – Try out the tool or read through our use cases, especially regarding: Use Case 1 – Joint Reflection on Past and Future Climate and Use Case 2 – Changes in Agro-Climatic Suitability Zones.
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/142000