Building resilience and adaptation to climate change through information technology and climate services

Smallholder and subsistence farmers in Benin

Successful adaptation to crisis requires timely and accessible information, which enables informed decision making in complex and uncertain environments. This is specially the case for the most vulnerable segments of society, such as subsistence farmers in the developing world, which in many cases do not have access to information to secure their agricultural livelihoods and resilience in the face of a changing climate. By setting up an innovative information system through mobile phone SMS with local implementing partners, expertise from the CLICCS cluster of excellence, and WiSo faculty, our project aims to deliver timely weather and technological information to ensure climate change adaptation and efficient allocation of scarce inputs for subsistence farmers in Benin. We conduct a field experiment in different provinces of Benin to quantify the impact of information provision on farmers’ ability to adapt to changing weather patterns and to improve the welfare of local subsistence farmers.