The FAO has three main goals: the eradication of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition; the elimination of poverty and the driving forward of economic and social progress for all; and, the sustainable management and utilization of natural resources, including land, water, air, climate and genetic resources for the benefit of present and future generations.
AREAS OF SUPPORT
FAO is one of the UN agencies supporting the NAP global support programme established by the UNDP and UNEP with funding from the Global Environmental Facility. As part of NAP GSP, FAO assists countries in specific aspects of the process to formulate and implement NAP. The areas of support range from technical support to countries by way of including them as one of beneficiaries to existing suits of adaptation projects, or by providing technical guidelines, tools and methods on assessment to ensure food security under a changing climate.
FAO is implementing a series of global programmes that are successfully supporting countries to develop and implement the policy frameworks and institutional arrangements needed to transform policy and create an enabling environment for agricultural development under climate change.
PROGRAMMES ON NAPs
Integrating agriculture in national adaptation plans Programme. FAO and the United Nations Development programme (UNDP) have joined together to support countries as they integrate their agriculture sectors in the national adaptation planning processes. The programme is a multi-year initiative funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB). The main goal is to support partner countries to identify and integrate climate adaptation measures for the agricultural sector into relevant national planning and budgeting processes.
The Integrating agriculture in national adaptation plans Programme initially targets eight countries: Kenya, Nepal, Philippines, Thailand, Uganda, Uruguay, Vietnam and Zambia. However, there are plans to expand the support to other countries in the Pacific, Asia, Africa as well as Latin America and the Caribbean.
For more information about the programme, you can check the briefer here.
Modeling System for Agricultural Impacts of Climate Change (MOSAICC). It is the FAO modeling system to assess climate change impacts on agriculture sector at the national level. It is a system of models and utilities designed to carry out inter-disciplinary climate change impact assessment on agriculture through simulations. The main components of the system are one statistical downscaling portal to downscale Global Circulation Models (GCM) data to weather stations networks, one hydrological model for estimating water resources for irrigation in major basins, two water balance-based crop models to simulate crop yields under climate change scenarios and finally one Computable General Equilibrium model (CGE) to assess the effect of changing yields on national economies. The model is piloted in Morocco. Materials and documentation on methods and tools are available here
http://www.fao.org/climatechange/mosaicc/67887/en/.
Agriculture supplement to the LEG technical guideline. FAO is also in the process of finalizing the supplementary material to the NAP technical guidelines. This aims to provide more in-depth coverage of assessment and analysis of impacts and identification of adaptation options for the agriculture sector.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations