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Mr Subhash Palekar gave a public talk on talk on Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) on 28.07.16 at the Farmer Training School of the Food and Research and Extension Institute in Mauritius. “Zero Budget spiritual Farming means for all the crops, the production cost will be zero. In the Zero Budget Natural Farming nothing has to be purchased from the outside. All things required for the growth of the plant are available around the root zone of the plants.” …. Read more on his website.

This publication is a report of the outcomes of the workshop convened by His Excellency, Lt. General Dr. Seretse Khama Ian Khama, President of Botswana and Chairperson of SADC in May 2016 on Food Security and Poverty Eradication to exchange ideas on how to address several food and nutrition security challenges in Southern Africa.

The Cape coastline faces into a turbulent ocean. Climate change will make this naturally stormy sea all the more formidable. Cape Town has inherited a complex space to manage: land reclaimed from the sea for forts and harbour walls; towering residential flats lined with cemented promenades; economically critical ports and railway lines; ecologically sensitive beaches, dunes and river mouths; and a legacy of dispossession of black South Africans, and privileged access for wealthy whites.

Increasingly stormy seas and higher sea levels are beginning to show up the existing fault lines in the engineered, social and institutional strata of this complex coastline. People working within the City of Cape Town (CoCT) today are making decisions about how to manage these vulnerable spaces – decisions that future generations will have to live and work with.

Short-term, piece-meal, opportunistic responses to the threat of stormier seas will only increase how vulnerable the built city, its inhabitants, economic activities, and the natural environment are. The City, lead by its Environmental Resource Management Department, is developing a rigorous coastal policy and management framework that will enable politicians, managers and residents to respond consistently and appropriately as they are confronted with an uncertain, dynamic, climate-altered future.

This booklet presents research done by the University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities, the Stockholm Environment Institute and partner institutions, working closely with the City of Cape Town, to explore ways to manage changing coastal risks

The Green Choice Alliance (GCA) developed a Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Framework to measure the conservation and socio-economic gains of projects that are being implemented using sustainable land use best practice methods and located within the biodiversity hotspots of South Africa as shown on the map.

The Climate Information Portal (CIP) is a web interface operated by the Climate System Analysis Group (CSAG), at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. The portal, which currently provides climate information for Africa and Asia, integrates climate information into a user-friendly map and graph-based interface. The information comes from a climate database that stores a large suite of observed climate data as well as projections of future climate.

Namibia is one of the countries mostly vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change which may affect our national development goals, particularly the agricultural sector, including food security. The Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET) and the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Forestry (MAWF) is implementing a five-year project entitled “Scaling up community resilience to climate variability and climate change in Northern Namibia, with a special focus on women and children” (SCORE Project) with funding resources from the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) through the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The project aims to strengthen the adaptive capacity of 4000 households to climate change and reduce their vulnerability to droughts and floods, with 80% of these households being women-led, and children from 75 schools in Northern Namibia. The project’s desired outcomes include: (1) Smallholder adaptive capacity for climate resilient agricultural practices strengthened; (2) Reduce vulnerability to droughts and floods; and (3) Mainstreaming climate change into national agricultural strategy/sectoral policy, including budgetary adjustments for replication and scaling up.

The South African Risk and Vulnerability Atlas (SARVA) is a platform for global change information transfer from research to policy and decision makers. The SARVA program provides a centralised repository for global change research (www.rvatlas.org.za) as well as a collection of integration and awareness tools aimed at improving evidence-based decision-making concerning global change. The current focus of the Atlas is on the country, regions and localities of South Africa. However investigations are being carried out to assess expansion opportunities into other parts of the region.

An advert to engage a wheat consultant in southern Africa

This document is a National Climate Change Policy (NCCP) for Namibia. It presents information about the main expected impacts of climate change and, those most vulnerable to climate change. The document also proposes objectives that the Government of Namibia will aim to achieve through an effective and efficient response to climate change. This policy was developed based on information obtained from prior climate change related studies that were undertaken for the First Namibia National Communication (FNC) to UNFCCC as well as that used to prepare the Namibia’s Second National Communication (SNC) and the assessment of financial and economic flows. Lastly but not least, input from various stakeholders have been incorporated.

In the light of the seasonal outlook as produced by the South African Weather Service (SAWS), the following advisory guidelines are suggested. It is emphasized that these advisories are broad guidelines and should be interpreted considering the local aspects of the region such as soil types, cultural preferences and farming systems. Depending on the particular region, the prioritization of the guidelines will differ. The basic strategy to follow would be to minimize and diversify risk, optimize soil water availability and to manage the renewable resources (rain water and grazing) to uphold sound farming objectives. Long-term mitigation strategies should be considered by implementing techniques to enhance in-field water harvesting by reducing run-off and improving infiltration. Reduced tillage methods are very important in this regard, as is basin tillage, to capture rainwater in the drier areas. The provinces should further simplify, downscale and package the information according to their language preference and if possible use local media and farmers’ days to disseminate the information. Users are advised to be on the look-out and act on the daily extreme weather warnings as well as the monthly advisory.