Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Correspondence
  • Published:

Decision support tools for agricultural adaptation in Africa

Nature Food volume 5, pages 186–188 (2024)Cite this article

Subjects

Extensive and strategic investments are needed to adapt African agriculture to climate change. In 2020, US$2.8 billion were committed to adaptation in the agriculture, forestry and land use sector1. This figure is likely to rise as the public and private sectors focus efforts on national commitments towards the Paris Agreement (the so-called Paris Alignment) and all African countries prioritize agricultural adaptation2.

These shortcomings highlight an opportunity for the agricultural adaptation community to draw lessons from other sectors. The first is ensuring that DSTs are highly tailored to users’ needs, norms and capacities5. Many current designs suggest developers have incomplete information about decision-makers’ tasks, problems and expectations around data accuracy and visualization. For example, adaptation DSTs tend to favour sophisticated graphs, indices and maps over simple tables. Yet, it is the simple tables that decision-makers often need. Adopting strategies from software development to enhance user experience — including formulating user personas, diagramming user journeys, and early and on-going user testing — may help. Indeed, explicit sections to gather detailed user feedback about DST components are uncommon, as are iterative updates and releases. Creation of continuous feedback would help design with an awareness of users’ digital fluency and patterns surrounding technology use, ensuring that DSTs cater to the ways individuals interact with digital tools. In Africa, for example, users are most likely to access DSTs via mobile phone- and tablet-compliant websites and apps. Continuous user engagement and feature improvement inherently demands development of business models for platform sustainability, which is often neglected. The Global Yield Gap Atlas is a prominent example towards sustainably serving commercial and non-profit users. Embracing these user-oriented strategies, however, will also require building specific required skillsets, often missing, in agricultural and/or meteorological research organizations.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Fig. 1: Comparison of data used in Green Climate Fund projects in African countries and its availability in selected DSTs.

References

  1. State and Trends in Adaptation Report 2022 96–125 (Global Center on Adaptation, 2022).

  2. Nowak, A., Njuguna, L. & Crumpler, K. Adaptation elements in African Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) (Harvard Dataverse, 2023); https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VK3CP9

  3. Wong-Parodi, G., Mach, K. J., Jagannathan, K. & Sjostrom, K. D. Curr. Opin. Environ. Sustain. 42, 52–59 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Pearman, O. & Cravens, A. E. Environ. Sci. Policy 128, 317–325 (2022).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Steinke, J., Ortiz-Crespo, B., Van Etten, J. & Müller, A. Agric. Syst. 195, 103313 (2022).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Roussaki, I. et al. Digit. Commun. Netw. 9, 183–193 (2023).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Eriksen, S. et al. World Dev. 141, 105383 (2021).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Yet, B., Lamanna, C., Shepherd, K. D. & Rosenstock, T. S. PLoS ONE 15, e0234213 (2020).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  9. Zhai, Z., Martínez, J. F., Beltran, V. & Martínez, N. L. Comput. Electron. Agric. 170, 105256 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Simpson, N. P. et al. One Earth 4, 489–501 (2021).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA) programme, funded by a grant from the International Development Association (IDA) of the World Bank, supported this group’s effort. Data for Fig. 1 were compiled for the Adaptation Atlas, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bioversity International, Montpellier, France

    Todd S. Rosenstock

  2. International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Nairobi, Kenya

    Namita Joshi, Lucy Njuguna & Peter Steward

  3. International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Almadies, Dakar, Senegal

    Alcade C. Segnon

  4. International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Nairobi, Kenya

    Laura Cramer

  5. International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

    Caroline Mwongera

  6. Bioversity International, Rome, Italy

    Andreea C. Nowak & Julian Ramirez-Villegas

  7. Plant Production Systems Group, Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Andreea C. Nowak & Julian Ramirez-Villegas

  8. Africa Rice Center (AfricaRice), Bouaké, Ivory Coast

    Elliot R. Dossou-Yovo

Authors
  1. Todd S. Rosenstock
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Namita Joshi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Alcade C. Segnon
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Laura Cramer
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Caroline Mwongera
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Andreea C. Nowak
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Lucy Njuguna
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  8. Elliot R. Dossou-Yovo
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  9. Peter Steward
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  10. Julian Ramirez-Villegas
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Todd S. Rosenstock.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Peer review

Peer review information

Nature Food thanks Jonathan Steinke and Zhaoyu Zhai for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Rosenstock, T.S., Joshi, N., Segnon, A.C. et al. Decision support tools for agricultural adaptation in Africa. Nat Food 5, 186–188 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-024-00936-9

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-024-00936-9

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing