Ken Okeke
The Agriculture Innovation Mechanism for Scale (AIM for Scale) has unveiled its first-ever, groundbreaking Innovation Package, aimed at providing weather information to help farmers adapt to the impacts of climate change.
The unveiling took place at the ongoing COP29 World Leaders Climate Action Summit holding in Azerbaijan.
A consortium of global partners (Global Partnership to Scale-Up Weather Services for Farmers) committed to mobilizing significant investments totaling more than One Billion United States Dollars over the next three years to drive the implementation of the AIM for Scale Weather Package. The partners are the Gates Foundation, United Arab Emirates (UAE), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and NASA, working with Congress and through the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience (PREPARE), the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare of India, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Community Jameel, The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and the University of Chicago’s Human-Centered Weather Forecasts and AI for Climate (AICE) initiatives, in partnership with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Systematic Observations Financing Facility (SOFF), and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
The Director General And Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet), and Permanent Representative of Nigeria with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Professor Charles Anosike, representing WMO community shared experiences of NiMet’s Seasonal Climate Prediction (SCP), and ongoing projects funded by the Gates Foundation in support of scaling up weather services for millions of farmers in Nigeria. “I am looking forward to strengthening our agrometeorological systems to support #EW4ALL in Nigeria at the Nigerian Meteorological Agency.”, he said.
Her Excellency, Dr. Amna al Dahak, Minister for Climate Change and Environment of the UAE, welcomed the launch of AIM for Scale following the achievements of the AIM for Climate platform, saying: “Today, with the launch of AIM for Scale, we are accelerating our efforts to find highly promising, climate-friendly agricultural innovations and breaking down barriers to their scaling.”
Nobel laureate Michael Kremer, Chair of the Innovation Commission for Climate Change, Food Security, and Agriculture and Chair of AIM for Scale’s Advisory Panel, highlighted the significance of these investments: “There is a wealth of evidence that smallholder farmers benefit from high-quality weather forecasts. Yet, the challenge of reaching hundreds of millions of farmers remains. AIM for Scale is a vital step toward filling this gap by leveraging new investments and global partnerships.”