MSc students at Wageningen University (WUR) have the opportunity in their master programmes to work as consultants on real-world problems. This year, four students from different master’s programmes conducted research and developed new solutions for FutureWater’s work in the BUCRA project in Egypt.
BUCRA is an RvO-sponsored project in which FutureWater, the Netherlands African Business Council, Witteveen+Bos, Delphy, SkillEd, Sanable, Mozare3 and Buzoor collaborate to find new pathways for climate-smart agriculture in the upper Nile Delta. As part of the project, FutureWater is further developing its crop advisory tool Croptimal.
Croptimal provides crop suitability advice based on remote-sensing-derived weather and soil data. The tool can serve both smallholder farmers with field-specific crop advice and policymakers with region-wide agricultural planning. Two major challenges for the development of Croptimal are the integration of reliable seasonal weather forecasts and the integration of long-term climate projections.
With increasingly erratic weather patterns, farmers can rely less and less on their historical experience to select the right crop for the next season. Seasonal forecasts help farmers select crops that are best suited to the conditions of the upcoming season within a changing climate. However, seasonal forecast products are not readily available and often need to be calibrated to specific regions. The WUR students researched the best available seasonal forecast products, then bias-corrected the most suitable dataset based on historical observations for Egypt, and integrated the whole workflow within the Croptimal tool. The students’ research and integration of seasonal forecasts can help farmers in the Nile Delta adapt their crop selection to uncommonly hot or dry seasons, which becoming more and comming unfortunately.
The second part of the project involved integrating multi-decadal climate projections into Croptimal, transforming the tool into a policy advisory platform. The aim was to create region-wide crop suitability maps for different climate projections. The students first researched the best available dataset for this project. Next, they designed a web-map application that can visualise crop suitability under different climate scenarios. For the design they did not just consider technical feasibility, but drew on insights from communication science and design philosophy to develop an application that is easy to use and conveys the most important insights convincingly to non-technical stakeholders. The web-map will help policymakers better understand the effects of climate change on food production and visualise the regional and temporal trends for these effects.
The students not only contributed important and useful work to the BUCRA project, but their ingenuity and creativity also helped FutureWater explore new pathways for its Croptimal tool. Their contribution will form a lasting part of BUCRA’s work in helping Nile Delta farmers adapt to an increasingly changing climate.
