Members and Partners are invited to share, during these two days, their initiatives and future projects in this domain, and possibly to build the basis of collective actions of our universities, inside Europe itself, but also in cooperation with our partners in the South.

Background

With climate change being one of the most severe challenges to the rural and agricultural based economies in the developing countries in the 21st century, Universities and Agricultural Research Centres are facing an urgent need to prepare the human resources who will have to address this issue in the next 40 years, to tackle this challenge and thereby enhance the resilience of human and environmental systems in contexts of climate change and increased variability.

Capacity building initiatives in this regard have multiplied in the past few years, mostly on separate basis. Time has come to draw lessons from these experiments and to build on them to strengthen our knowledge basis about the learning objectives to be defined, about the methods of learning that can address these objectives and about the curricula and training tools that can be associated to them. For sure, climate change being an archetype of a global challenge, addressing adaptation or mitigation as a training objective cannot be fulfilled only in isolated disciplines or contexts. Particularly, tropical and temperate environments are linked with each other and responses require cooperation.

Two questions will lead to deeper specific discussions:

• The question of the competences and the skills that are associated with addressing climate change as a professional in agriculture.
  Beyond the technological options that can contribute to adaptation or to mitigation, is there a different way to address development of agriculture in a context of climate change? What are the common skills and the specific ones that specialised post graduate training should address?
• The question of the training tools that are being built to support the development of specialised courses.
  What are they and how are they built? Is there any option of pooling the existing resources, mutualising their access, especially for the universities in the South? Would there be any advantage in Agrinatura taking an initiative to produce more tools and make them accessible to all?

We welcome members and partner institutions to suggest any additional option for enforcing and extending new partnerships on these issues!