The workshop was organised on-site by the West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL), with PIK researchers participating virtually. Due to COVID-19 regulations and to lower the risk of spreading the virus, the workshop was held over two days to lower the group of attendees for each day. Attendees included representatives from Burkina Faso’s government, researchers, civil society organisations and international organisations.
The central aim of the ClimSec project was to identify options and develop approaches for an early warning system on food insecurity in the Sahel region, while also considering impacts on human security and in particular farmer-herder conflicts. Within the project, different methods were combined from statistical modelling, machine-learning approaches to qualitative case studies based on in-depth interviews, in order to better understand the complex link between weather, agricultural production, food insecurity, migration and human insecurity. Where possible, forecasts were developed for parts of the causal chain. In-depth investigations of migration and conflict dynamics in the Northwest and in Central Burkina Faso provided insights on ripple effects of weather-induced resource- and food-shortages on human security.
The final project workshop took place in Burkina Faso, one of the core countries of the project. Next to a presentation of the key research findings, the workshop also provided space for discussion on how to use the findings, next steps to implementation and ways to bring the different research strands together. For this purpose, a participatory exercise on Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) was conducted, this allowed the combination of expert knowledge with other sources of information, such as empirical data and modelling results.
More information on the ClimSec project can be found here.
