BE/CNH: Climate Information and Forecasts in Agricultural Production Systems of the Argentine Pampas: Planning for Their Effective Use in Decision Making

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Agricultural production is a complex natural-human system that involves multiple value-laden objectives and various sources of risk. One of the major risk sources to agriculture is climate variability. In many parts of the world, the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon is the major single source of climate variability on seasonal-to-interannual scales. Links between ENSO-related climate variability and agricultural production have been established for many regions, including the Pampas of Argentina, a major production region and the geographic focus of the proposed effort. Recent scientific and technological advances have made it possible to forecast, with moderate skill, ENSO events with a lead time of months. In the agricultural sector, ENSO-related climate forecasts may help to reduce risks of adverse conditions or to take advantage of favorable conditions. Simply documenting the effects of climate variability and providing better climate forecasts is not sufficient to derive benefits from the emerging predictive capability, however. The factors that make many farmers reluctant to respond to climate information requires scientific attention in order to derive significant benefits from to the climate predictions. This collaborative project between U.S. and Argentine researchers seeks to enhance understandings of the use of probabilistic climate information to support decision making in agricultural production systems; to anticipate and possibly prevent unintended negative societal consequences of climate prediction, and to inform the design of a future operational system to disseminate climate information relevant and useful to decision and policy making in agriculture. The project will involve planning workshops and preliminary research to inform the planning effort. Two planning workshops will help to frame the problems to be addressed during the planning process, identify major research needs, and design a detailed plan for future work. Major issues to be addressed during planning workshops include the major sources of uncertainty in each component of the modeling approach and the identification and explication of the assumptions and limitations associated with all models that are used. Preliminary research activities to be undertaken include individual interviews and focus groups with farmers and technical advisors in the Argentine Pampas. The preliminary work also will include a survey of institutions that produce and disseminate climate information or agricultural advice and a description of existing decision-support tools that could be adapted to include climate forecast information.This end-to-end exploration of components of a system for the use of climate information and forecasts in agriculture and other sectors will help assemble an effective multidisciplinary team of researchers drawn from the natural and social sciences. This project should foster greater knowledge about the ways through which newly available climate information can influence the complex interactions among human and natural systems like agricultural production in the Argentine Pampas may respond to the. The project should also help to lay the foundation for future work on the constraints and incentives for the effective use of climate information in benefit of society. This project is an award emanating from the FY 2001 special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems.