General news

This week, mid of May 2022, we are happily announcing the good news from the WATERAPPscale and WAGRINNOVA teams that the DROP App, a Climate Information Services (CIS) embedded with soil moisture (SM) module, is ready to be tested in Tamale, Ghana.

The WATERAPPS team published a new paper in the Agronomy journal with the title “the Role of Soil Moisture Information in Developing Robust Climate Services for Smallholder Farmers: Evidence from Ghana” (Figure 1). In this paper, Sutanto et al. assess the role of soil moisture information in farmers’ agricultural decision-making

On Tuesday, the 8th of February, Dr. Spyros Paparrizos delivered an online lecture on ‘Water & Climate Information Services’ as part of a series of Lunchtime Talks of the EXtremeClimTwin project.

Although Climate Information Services (CIS) has been promoted in Ghana and also in Bangladesh (see Gbangou et al. 2020 and Kumar et al., 2021), this system only provides information on the recent and forecasted meteorological variables, primarily precipitation and temperature. Soil moisture that plays an important role in the soil-plant-atmosphere system is still missing

From 23 to 25 November 2021, the NWO program Urbanising Delta of the World (UDW) held a UDW final virtual conference with the theme “Breaking Barriers”. The WATERAPPS and WATERAPPscale also participated in the UDW final conference by presenting the project results.

Spyridon Paparrizos’s publication is highlighted in the Nature Climate Change journal under the theme Agriculture Adaptation. In his article, Paparrizos et al. evaluate the willingness of farmers to pay for participatory climate information services. Below, we provide the content of research highlights as it is published in the Nature Climate Change highlights.

On Thursday the 8th of July, 2021, the WATERAPPS + WATERAPPscale participated in the Seminar on 'Building bridges for delta innovations' where the outcomes of the WATERAPPS such as the FarmerSupport app and the 'weather clubs' in Khulna, Bangladesh were presented. More than 50 participants exchanged ideas on building resilient detlas using innovations.

With support of the UDW programme and participating UDW projects Involving Bangladesh, Vietnamese and Dutch partners, we are organizing an international seminar to showcase the key results and furthermore facilitate a discussion with experts and stakeholders on how participatory tools and innovations contribute to planning and management practices. With a strong focus on practical use of delta innovation, the seminar consists of presentations, panel discussion and impact stories in the format of a short video presentation.

Regional event - Urbanizing Deltas of the World Building bridges for delta interventions: A Seminar and Tool lab session on crossing scales, domains and engaging local stakeholders using the MOTA and WATERAPPS tools

For International Women's Day 2021, Louise O. Fresco, Kitty van der Heijden, and Rebecca Sarku share a virtual coffee to chat about agriculture, Africa and women. They discuss everything from Ghanaian cocoa, COP26 and how challenging gender bias and inequality is essential for climate action.

With its tropical climate and increasingly intensive agricultural development the Kuhlna district in Bangladesh is sensitive to climate and weather change. And in a relatively underdeveloped country, there are increasing opportunities for using climate information to reduce agricultural risks. This is tackled in the WaterApps project through the research of Uthpal Kumar, a Bangladeshi researcher connected to both Wageningen University and Khulna University.

Seasonal forecasting is becoming an increasingly useful tool to support long term decision making in farming. There is a great potential in utilizing seasonal forecasts for farming practices if it is done properly. This can include supporting decisions about sowing, harvesting and irrigation as well as the choices of planting a specific crop variety.

Information is more and more available today, mainly due to a quickly developing IT sector. This blog is the result of a research done by a master student at Wageningen University who looked into the information services developed and used in farmer-decision making in Khulna, Bangladesh.

The WaterApps project acknowledges that water-related information is important. But: How exactly does it flow between the stakeholders? What types of information are transferred to the farmers? How does this affect the decisions made and what can be learned from today’s information delivery for future information design?

Daan Musters explores existing innovation systems to support crop production and how to improve this them in Ghana.

Crop production in large parts of the world is facing increasingly critical challenges due to changing climate and water availability conditions. Prolonged droughts, widespread floods and erratic rainfall patterns are amongst the key factors affecting crop harvest and quality of agricultural commodities. Researchers from Wageningen University, the Netherlands recently launched an international research program to support farmers dealing with such challenges. The Waterapps program aims to contribute to more sustainable crop production with its tailor made weather and water information for farmers.