Adaptation Need

The Zambezi River Basin is facing increasing climate risks, including droughts, floods, rising temperatures, and changing rainfall patterns, which threaten agriculture, ecosystems, and livelihoods. Existing adaptation measures are insufficient, leaving communities vulnerable to food insecurity, poverty, and climate-related disasters. Urgent, scalable adaptation actions are needed to strengthen resilience and support sustainable development.

GCA’s Added Value

The Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) enhanced the PIDACC programme by integrating ecosystem-based adaptation and digital climate advisory services to improve resilience, sustainable landscape management, and institutional capacity. Through climate risk assessments and stakeholder consultations, GCA identified priority adaptation needs and promoted digital technologies to strengthen climate resilience across the basin.

RICE RESEARCH

Developing cultivation techniques favorable to various ecologies

Higher Productivity is the focus of the activity. The productivity of rice production in Zambia is 1.20 ton/ha (FAO2019), which is quite low, even comparing to other African countries not very actively producing rice[*]. Low productivity is not because the natural environment is not suitable for rice production. The basic cultivation and harvest/post-harvest processing techniques practiced by farmers are the problem. For the improvement of productivity, while supporting the Zambia Agriculture Agriculture Research Institute (ZARI) and developing its rice research capacity, MOReDeP researches to find solutions to the problems and develops a rice production techniques package that is flexible and favorable to the various ecologies in Zambia. The main research themes include cultivation technology, harvest/post harvest, seed production, mechanization and variety/breeding.

[*] The productivity of rice production in Africa region is 2.27 ton/ha. Kennya is 6.84 ton/ha, which is the highest in the Africa region (FAO2019).