STRATADAPT Mali

The final goal is to enable the national agricultural, scientific and governmental communities to jointly study, define and implement climate-resilient farming practices for sorghum.

While field research is being conducted on these practices, the generation of modelling insights on their expected effectiveness will potentialize the required engagement with policymakers and the general society for their implementation.

The project aims to contribute to this by promoting co-creation of scientific results.

In this project, VITO leads a consortium composed of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), the Institute of Rural Economy (IER) of Mali, the National Meteorological Agency of Mali (Mali-Meteo), and the Flanders Research Institute of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (ILVO).

We promote an enabling environment for the Malian research, policy and civil society to investigate and implement promising climate adaptation measures for resilient crop production.  

Sorghum takes centre stage, as one of the main food crops for the population and a promising bet for the hotter and drier weather conditions.

In concrete, we:

• support national experts and scientists in using crop models in combination with climate information tools to estimate present and future sorghum yields. This is done through a series of workshops and training visits;
• expand the availability of key crop and climate data, namely by generating high-resolution datasets of historical and future climate scenarios for Mali;
• assess the performance of adaptive management practices (such as resistant varieties, water-saving measures) in delivering robust sorghum yields and better coping with the future climatic conditions;
• stimulate the regional scientific and policymaking communities in jointly addressing the climate adaptation issues by disseminating the findings and promoting institutional collaboration and co-creation.

Some key outputs of these activities include:

• The set-up of computing infrastructure in Mali for crop research purposes. A server was installed in ICRISAT and is accessible by national partners.
• Further develop VITO’s CLIMTAG platform to include climate projections and agri-climate indicators for Mali, expanding the availability of climate information to National stakeholders.

• Training of Malian and West African scientists, technicians and students to use crop simulation models to estimate yields and studying adaptive field practices under future climate conditions. In a 5-day workshop entitled “West African Regional Training Workshop for Development Crop Modelling Experts”, which took place in 2023 in Senegal, we provided theoretical lectures and hands-on practical sessions to 30 participants from 6 different West African Countries. Three Malian experts also went through an intensive 2-month training programme in ILVO’s facilities in Belgium, focussed on the AquaCrop model.

• Sorghum crop yields were simulated with historical and future climate datasets. The Sorghum Climate Vulnerability Dashboard was developed to disseminate the results and their insights to the national society.
• Training of Malian meteorological and agricultural experts in the use of climate services, projections and indicators for a wide range of use-cases. A 3-day workshop was organized in Bamako, Mali, and counted with the presence of 30 officers from Mali-Meteo and other organizations. A dissemination video was made during the workshop (see below).

• A scientific publication was produced as a result of the project’s work in sorghum yield model simulations for several locations in Mali. The publication focusses on the results from a sensitivity analysis that made use of local crop and soil datasets, as well as future extreme climate timeseries produced by VITO.