Workshop towards building a climate-smart village

Hello there,

As mentioned in the last post, on Tuesday I was visiting different sites of Cauca climate-smart villages. On Wednesday I went to Morro Plano (near Morales) with Luis Alfonso (Ecohabitats) and Jimmy Mañunga (President of the association JAC – northwest Popayán). A group of families (in the workshop came 10 people – 8 men and 2 women) are starting the process to built a climate-smart village.

When I arrived there Jimmy showed me around. Mostly they have coffee crops, “ají” – spicy Colombian pepper – and tomatoes. Also, they have cucumber, some beans mixed with the “ají, and “lulo” (Solanum quitoense – fruit tree that is grown where the coffee crops to provide them shade).

The workshop started introducing ourselves to know more about each other and mostly to know their background. After that, Luis Alfonso started explaining about climate-smart agriculture and its three main pillars (productivity – food security, adaptation and mitigation of greenhouse gases). Then he started asking the participants about some different concepts such as adaptation, climate, variability.

After the theoric part, it was the practical one where the participants, in this case, older than 30 years old were the ones that their opinion was really important. The activity carried out was to make an agricultural calendar. This calendar was referred to the temperature and precipitation that they had in the region more than 30 years ago.

The workshop ended after this activity. While we were doing it the mayor of Morales (Silvio Villegas Sandoval) came and he is supporting all this process to built a climate-smart village

See you next week,

Laia.