Capacity-building

During three years the project partners worked together with farmers, collecting the most relevant information. This qualitative and quantitative data were analysed with our tool to assess the technical and economic viability of sustainable adaptation options. The information on the different areas of the EU, compiled and analysed for a better understanding of the challenges for adaptation to climate change in a European scenario, was communicated to political decision-makers.

Nevertheless, the consortium strongly believes that one of the best ways to scale-up adaptation measures is not only to address decision-makers and policy-makers, but also the stakeholders that are ultimately responsible for implementing the adaptation measures at farm level: the farming community.

The project results were presented and discussed with the main target groups and stakeholders in more than 120 workshops, webinars, etc. with a total of 1753 people trained and more than 650 participating entities. By doing this, these sustainable adaptation measures could incorporate later in different areas: policies, labels, insurances and agriculture schools or training centres.

The transference of information was carried out as follows:

Demonstration of feasibility and transferability of the common tool and sustainable adaptation measures to policy-makers, farmers and agri-food industry at national and EU scale through:

• More than 20 meeting with policies decisions at European and national level (European Comission, DG Clima, DG Agri, DG Environment; European Parliament, Joint Research Center, Copernicus, FAO, etc)
• More than 173 events attended at European and national level
• Transnational conferences in Spain, France, Germany and Estonia.
• Institutional training addressed to farmers with stakeholders and capacity-building groups; 57 workshops.
• Elaboration and distribution of a “Farming Adaptation Training Pack” for the Agrarian Sector with more than 1500 downloads.

All over the EU there are similar capacity building structures for farmers, which have been divided in this project, for practical reasons, into capacity building structures for current farmers and for future farmers. The capacity building for current farmers is closer to the advisory concept/structures, while the capacity building for future farmers falls on the educational training side. In both cases, this action aims at delivering simple, realistic and demonstrative information on adaptation to climate change to the farming sector. It is also important to point out that the project did not aim created new capacity building structures (which would be complex and probably useless) but to incorporate this information into the existing channels and platforms that are commonly used by current and future farmers. Therefore, it was very important to meet farming trainers and advisors, to discuss the contents and to adapt the information format to the diverse capacity building channels.