A Digital Public Good demystifying climate resilience in agriculture
UNDP Accelerator Labs, Rockefeller Foundation, Government of Telangana, ICRISAT, Zero Hunger Lab, JADS, RICH
Globally agriculture causes a third of green house gas emissions. In India climate change causes upto 25% loss in agriculture income of small holder farmers. However the policy makers and decision makers in agriculture ecosystem don't have a complete understanding of impact of climate change on agriculture.The most frequently asked question by decisiona makers is - where is evidence? We have developed DiCRA to address this pain point by providing evidence on impact of climate change and demystifying climate resilience.
Data in Climate Resilient Agriculture (DiCRA) is a collaborative digital public good that applies openAI to provide key geospatial datasets to demystify climate resilience in agriculture and mainstream data-driven decision making on climate adaptation in agriculture. DiCRA provides high--resolution intelligence on 20+ agriculture parameters, and insights from pattern detection algorithms on decadal time trends. Data insights on 'what is where, how much is there, how are things changing with space and time' zoomed till farm level promoted evidence-based decision making across the agriculture ecossytem. DiCRA data collaborative facilitates customization of use cases such as interaction between parameters, spatial analytics, composite indices etc., based on the requirement of stakeholders. By providing output and outcome level ingishts in agriculture, DiCRA strives to bring sustainability and longterm thinking into agriculture programming.
Participation of community (in this case farmers) is an important aspect allied with DiCRA platform. Farmers in India are often semi-literate people with limited internet connectivity.To tackle this, about 100 citizen scientists are trained as ethnographers to connect DiCRA with farmers, tap into indigenous knowledge and validate data.Additionally farmer producer organizations (community organizations) with special emphasis on women farmers are trained on DiCRA platform to bridge the digital divide.
DiCRA data collaborative has attracted analytical contributions from 9 organizations and 100+ volunteering data scientistsDiCRA is providing geospatial intelligence up to 20m spatial resolution on climate resilience covering 112,077 square km of land (area larger than South Korea) in Telangana State (India). It is used to optimize public investments of 71 million USD under 'Rythu Vedika' scheme in Telangana.1350 unique users have used DiCRA with almost 10,000 views after the platform went LIVE in March 2022.
"In partnership with government, DiCRA is scaling to three more states in India (equivalent to mid-size countries). Additionally seven UNDP Accelerator Labs liked the value proposition and scalability of this Digital Public Good using alternative data and have shown interest in scaling DiCRA. These labs are from Africa (Congo, Nigeria, Zambia) and South America (Guatemala, Peru, Ecquador, Dominican Republic). We are exploring resources to cater to this interest. "
