Climate change is taking a toll on farmers in Africa. Here’s how AI technology can help | 24CA News
The Current12:04How AI might assist African farmers address local weather change
Maintaining her cocoa farm has change into a tedious and demoralizing activity for Ghanaian farmer Deborah Osei-Mensah. She’s amongst many farmers in Africa experiencing the brunt of local weather change.
“Each year I report a bit less productivity. This is due to droughts and the change in weather patterns. Days that it’s supposed to rain, we are not getting enough. Days that we have rain, we also get an excess of rain,” she mentioned.
Extreme warmth strips Osei-Mensah’s cocoa pods of much-needed water that permit them to correctly develop and ripen, leaving them immature and unusable. Meanwhile, extra rainfall tends to go away her timber vulnerable to ailments and pests.
“This keeps on becoming very severe each and every day. If productivity keeps dropping, then people’s livelihoods will be impacted. There will be a high rate of hunger,” Osei-Mensah mentioned.
The unpredictability of ever-changing rising circumstances equivalent to historic droughts has been on the forefront of the challenges farmers are dealing with in adapting to local weather change.
Now, a staff of researchers in Senegal have developed a synthetic intelligence (AI) instrument referred to as Africa Agriculture Watch, or AAgWa, to assist deal with that problem.
By utilizing satellite tv for pc information and pictures, AAgWa remotely senses biophysical parameters of the bottom, combs via historic manufacturing maps, after which makes use of machine studying to foretell doable rising circumstances.
It will have the ability to present info on warmth depth and its influence on crops, degree of anticipated rainfall, and soil fertility to farmers like Osei-Mensah, mentioned Racine Ly, director of knowledge administration on the pan-African analysis non-profit Akademiya 2063.
“Any disruption that you see in the growing conditions would be propagated into our models and then will show what would be the impact in the production,” Ly instructed The Current’s visitor host Robyn Bresnahan.
“So basically you can have a map where you can know what are the most likely crops that you can grow in a certain area based on the growing condition trends.”
Ly additionally says AAgWa will have the ability to inform farmers how a lot yield to anticipate.
“If we are able to keep up to date with what is happening at least we will be able to protect most of our crops,” Osei-Mensah mentioned.
AAgWa at the moment covers 47 African international locations with a heavy give attention to staple crops equivalent to maize, cassava, and sorghum. According to Ly, it has an accuracy fee of 94 per cent.
“Sometimes we have countries where our predictions are diverging. In that case, what we do is we update the model and update the predictions based on that event,” Ly mentioned.
Punishing circumstances
Despite accounting for less than three per cent of the world’s international emissions, Africa is among the many worst areas feeling the influence of local weather change. Agriculture is among the many hardest-hit sectors.
According to a 2022 report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), agricultural productiveness within the continent has declined by 34 per cent during the last six a long time as a direct results of local weather change.
That decline poses a threat to Africa’s meals safety. Already, greater than 140 million folks are dealing with acute meals insecurity and want pressing help.
That quantity is anticipated to climb as historic droughts proceed to plague East Africa, which is already experiencing its worst meals disaster in 40 years.
“There are two ways of increasing food production. You have your crop management. But another way of maybe increasing production is to reduce losses. That’s where AAgWa is focusing on,” Ly mentioned.
In her a long time of farming, the occasions at the moment taking part in out on her farm and others round her come as a shock to Osei-Mensah.
“I got experience about 20 years back when I used to follow my parents to the farm. And so I knew how good weather can improve their productivity,” she mentioned.
But the string of dangerous climate, ailments to her crops, and poor yields have left her discouraged and even at occasions questioning whether or not to proceed farming.
“For about two weeks I’ve not been to the farm because when you go there, instead of being happy, you’re sad,” she mentioned.
Educating farmers on the way to use AAgWa is the subsequent hurdle Ly and his staff now have to beat.
“We have farmers that are not willing, maybe, to open their doors to technologies and see how they can use it to improve their production. But also we have farmers that are very interested in using it,” he mentioned.
The researchers have been working with grass root farmer organizations to assist translate the info into significant info that will result in tangible actions by farmers.
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AAgWa joins an arsenal of instruments, equivalent to hybrid seeds, and drones, getting used within the continent to deal with new challenges local weather change has delivered to the agricultural sector.
“The work that Racine is doing is fantastic because on the African continent, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, it is very difficult to predict the yield that the farmers will have,” mentioned Canisius Kanangire, govt director of the African Agriculture Technology Foundation.
Kanangire is urging African governments to step up their efforts in addressing local weather change and its influence on agriculture by changing into extra proactive relatively than reactive.
“To be proactive means to get technologies and innovation to the continent and then adapt them to the conditions of the farmers. If we do it, then we would not be firefighting when the drought has hit in an area,” he mentioned.
Among the instruments Kanangire is asking for is entry to “controlled water” reserves to make use of throughout extreme droughts and extra “drought-resistant technologies translated into the seeds.”
Kanangire additionally careworn the significance of getting initiatives led and run by Africans.
“When it is done by Africans, we have two positive things that we see. First, it is adapted to the conditions of the African continent. Second, it is at least an assurance that those technologies will be sustained,” Kanangire mentioned.
