Researchers, Scientists and Developers Urged To Invest In Climate Data

WWF Tanzania’s Country Director Dr. Amani Ngusaru  is making a speech on Friday last week during the WWF - Ruaha Water Program-SWAUM exit workshop held in Njombe Region. (PHOTO: FRIDAY SIMBAYA)

 Njombe: WWF Tanzania’s Country Director Dr. Amani Ngusaru is calling on researchers, scientists and developers to create data-driven simulations to help plan for the future and to educate the public about the vulnerability of climate change, hence help farmers to plan for their future.

Dr. Ngusaru made the disclosure on Friday last week during the WWF - Ruaha Water Program-SWAUM exit workshop held in Njombe Region.

He said that this effort will help give communities across the country the information and tools they need to plan for current and future climate impacts.

He said that farmers need to have right information about weather and climate so that they can know when to plant their fields because at the moment farmers in the country don’t know exactly what to do.

He said farmers are confused because they don’t when the rains are coming, they don't know when to cultivate and to plant but with the investment in climate data initiative (CDI) it will help them to plan for current and future climate impacts. 

WWF in collaboration with Care International are intending to implement Intensive Farming (IF) project in the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT).

SAGCOT’s objective is to foster inclusive, commercially successful agribusinesses that will benefit the region’s small-scale farmers, and in so doing, improve food security, reduce rural poverty and ensure environmental sustainability.

So, agricultural intensification and mechanization system is aimed to maximize yields from available land through various means, such as heavy use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. 

Intensive farming practices produce more and cheaper food per acre and animal, which has helped feed a booming human population and may prevent surrounding land from being converted into agricultural land.

However, WWF Tanzania has been working in the Great Ruaha River catchment with a focus on promoting and improving integrated water resources management since 2002. 

Throughout the intervening period however the once perennial Great Ruaha River (GRR) has run dry in the dry season for progressively longer periods.

Throughout the period 2011-2016 WWF Tanzania has been piloting the SWAUM programme – Sustainable Water Access, Use and Management. 

SWAUM was explicitly framed and designed to address a situation – shortfalls in water governance in the GRR catchment – that was understood to be ‘complex’ (i.e. widespread conflicts and disagreements, knowledge gaps and uncertainties, and weak organizational capacity).

And has sought to identify and address the institutional constraints, within and between both formal organizations and local communities. 

Lack of awareness or acknowledgment of these strategic constraints, and of any commensurate response, considerably weakened or undermined the effectiveness and potential sustainability of earlier management and technical initiatives.

SWAUM’s empirical findings are that there are systemic shortcomings in aspects of integration critical to the governance system – the ‘critical dimensions of integration’ (CDIs) – and given the continuing deference to IWRM as the governance model in the Rufiji Basin IWRMD Plan. 

It is said that unless these shortcomings are addressed, the pattern of governance failure will not be broken, nor the associated drying of the GRR reversed.