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 a variable context.
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, being an archetype of a global challenge, addressing climate change adaptation or mitigation as a training objective cannot be done only within isolated disciplines or contexts. Especially, tropical and temperate environments are linked with each other and responses do require cooperation.
Under the leadership of Agrinatura, the Association of European Universities and Research Centers on Agricultural Knowledge and Development, a group of Universities in Europe has decided to prepare European Joint Master Degree and to position this joint master degree in the center of a worldwide network of postgraduate training initiatives in this domain. This group of European Universities and post graduate institutes includes the universities of Boku (Vienna), Bonn, Copenhagen, Catania, Sevilla, Uppsala and Montpellier SupAgro.
The objective of the current proposal is twofold:
• Back to back with the next conference on Climate Smart Agriculture, organised at Montpellier on 16-18 March 2015, organise a side-event to network the different initiatives existing in the world on capacity building about agriculture and climate change issues. Draw the lessons learned about the skills and competences required by the research and development actions led in this area Transform these lessons learned into learning objectives, and hence training systems, comparing possible synopsis curricula and training methods.
• Contribute to organising a European supply in terms of postgraduate education and research in this area, leading to opening a European Master in Agriculture and Climate Change in which the Montpellier units would have a key role. The main organisational lines of this initiative will be presented in the side-event above mentioned, the suggestions for international collaborations will be collected, then organise a second – more restricted- meeting will be organised in May 2015 to fine tune the curriculum,
• In the meantime, precise the role and the contribution that the different Montpellier research units can bring to the training (in Montpellier but also in the other EU Universities), the benefits they can draw from the course (specially through the master thesis and recruitment of doctoral students), the regulation of such a transversal collaboration, and conclude on the organisation and the partnerships of this joint initiative.
Project Number : 1500-016
Year : 2015
Type of funding : SP
Project type : PC
Research units in the network : ECO&SOLS INNOVATION
Start date :
06 Mar 2015
End date :
30 Oct 2015
Flagship project :
Non
Project leader :
Sebastien Bainville
Project leader's institution :
InstitutAgro
Project leader's RU :
MOISA
Budget allocated :
10000 €
Total budget allocated ( including co-financing) :
10000 €
Funding :
Labex