At the beginning of this month, we implemented a workshop together with our colleagues from Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH.

Since being commissioned by the GIZ in 2020, we revised and improved the adaptation monitoring of ProSoil and now support all participating country packages in preparing and implementing the workshops to carry out the monitoring. The goal of the monitoring is to assess the climate change adaptation effect of ProSoil activities. ProSoil stands for Soil Protection and Rehabilitation of Degraded Soil for Food Security. It is a big supranational project with activities in Benin, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Madagascar, Tunisia. The overall goal is to implement and share approaches to promote lasting soil protection and rehabilitation.

Now, it was our great pleasure to finally prepare and participate in person in one of the workshops. During the workshop participating experts assessed and vividly discussed the prevalence of the climate risks drought events, soil erosion by water, loss of cover vegetation, increased heat stress for plants and animals and water logging. Further they assessed the adaptation effectiveness of the following activities: collecting and reserving seeds for the next season, cut and carry fodder, water-spreading weirs, dry stone measures and temporary area enclosure. These are implemented by ProSoil in the northeastern region Afar. Also, the two days were used for networking and reconnecting after #COVID19 travel and meeting restrictions. Further our colleagues from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research had shared their projections on the climatic impact drivers in Ethiopia. This assessment can be downloaded here along with a supplement paper which explains the methodology underlying the projections, how to interpret the figures etc.

We are very thankful to our GIZ-colleagues for the warm welcome and to all participants for sharing their expertise with us.

For further informtion on the project please visit our project site.