Coventry University is proud to host the launch of ‘EcoDry’ an exciting three-year, €560,000 EC-funded project to share knowledge on strategies to build the resilience of farming systems in dryland, drought and flooding situations. International partners to the project come from Spain, Mexico, South Africa and Jordan.
“Traditional practices for managing land in both dryland and wet conditions have often been lost in favour of more intensive practices.” Comments Dr. Julia Wright, Project Coordinator. “Climate change makes it particularly pressing that farmers around the world are able to adapt techniques to increase the resilience of their systems.”
The scheme enables early stage and experienced researchers from the UK and Spain to conduct field studies in any of the non-European countries, and visa versa, for a periods of up to eight months. Crucially the project will contribute to a bank of knowledge about innovative best practices for adapting to drought or flooding conditions and develop methods for working with farmers to implement these practices.
Dr. Michel Pimbert, Director of the Centre for Agroecology and Food Security (CAFS) notes that this project comes at a particularly timely moment. “CAFS is expanding to become one of Coventry’s first University Research Centres and this project will give researchers and students an excellent opportunity to conduct comparative research in locations of significant interest for our work.” The launch meeting was held over the 24th and 25th February followed by an international seminar on “Agroecology, Water and Climate Change” on the 26th February.
Learn more about the project, including comments from some of our international partners by watching the following video:
