Climate Resilience

Enrollment for this course is currently closed. Please check out MESA’s new AFFP program with agroecology course offerings for 2020.

This course analyzes the challenges that farmers face when confronting climate change and explores the opportunities to develop adaptation and resilience strategies. You will learn methods to assess the resilience of your farms to climatic variability as well as methodologies on how to evaluate the risk or vulnerability on your farm.  After applying such methodologies, you will be able to assess the impacts of climate change on agricultural production, as well as its potential ecological, social and economic impacts. You will also be able to identify potential mitigation and adaptive management strategies to avoid yield losses while maintaining ecological services derived from agriculture. The course explores the elements of socio-ecological resilience, which entails leveraging biodiversity, using organic soil management and water harvesting, as well as technological and social innovation for an agroecological re-design of farms to make them more resilient to climatic events. Our course will enable farmers to learn and share long-term risk management strategies

Overall Learning Objectives

1. Understand Agroecology (principles and practices) and its relevance  to climate change resilience
2. Learn how to evaluate the risk and vulnerability of farms  to extreme climatic events
3. Learn how to apply agroecological principles to Design a resilient farm plan