Paper short abstract:

Response farming was developed to connect farmer decision making with meteorological knowledge and climate policies. Science Field Shops were created in Indonesia as a Knowledge Transfer and Communication Technology hub for farmers, scientists and extension to prepare increased climate resilience.

Paper long abstract:

Farmers in large parts of economically less developed areas are suffering greatly from climate change. For example in the lowland tropics of Indonesia, temperature and rainfall have both become limiting factors of rice yields and in Africa maize has been shown to suffer from increasing temperatures and droughts as well. These effects will worsen with time. More and better climate services for agriculture will therefore have to be developed in places where extension has mostly not been working very well and has also not been updated on the consequences of climate change. In agrometeorology, response farming was developed to connect farmer decision making with meteorological knowledge and climate policies but it did not get widely applied. However, it was suitable as a starting point for the establishment of new Knowledge Transfer and Communication Technologies (KTCTs) seriously connected to extension to prepare decision making policies for increased climate resilience. Combining environmental anthropology with agroclimatology, Science Field Shops (SFSs) , as such a KTCT, were developed as a hub in which, in a period of five years, farmers and farmer facilitators from among them were trained for improved decision making that increased their climate resilience. In addition of dealing with basics of climate change and what could be expected locally from its developments, we used seven climate services that highly improved farmers' understanding of their changing environment and so their decision making. Farmers, as the private sector, and scientists recently convinced local governments and some NGOs to jointly scale up these SFSs.