About
Our project will use climate analogs – locations whose current climate is similar to a target location’s future climate – as a convening tool to facilitate dialog amongst current and future Extension professionals from paired locations across Climate Hub regions regarding concrete, actionable information for specialty crop climate adaptation. Analogs will be used within an immersive Academy experience to prepare agricultural educators, early career professionals and students via peer-to-peer learning dialogs, integrative knowledge assimilation, and applied projects.
Through this Academy, we will overcome a critical gap preventing climate change preparedness in the agricultural community – the idea that individuals will act if they receive the right “missing” climate change information and tools – an educational approach that has been shown repeatedly to be insufficient in complex situations where strategies and outcomes remain uncertain.
Through a NIFA-funded CAP (2017-68002-26789) focused on US fruit and vegetable systems, our team developed a climate change analog tool and introduced it to nearly 100 specialty crop Extension professionals from across the country. We then piloted a facilitated dialog with 10 paired Extension professionals in the Southeast and Southern Plains Hub regions to explore the potential of analogs to facilitate actionable information exchange for climate adaptation.
Building on this demonstrated interest, we propose to scale up this pilot dialog into a national train-the-trainer program partnering Extension with the USDA Climate Hubs in the major US specialty crop regions.
Our goal is to build Extension and Climate Hub capacity and expertise to catalyze climate change adaptation in US specialty crops.
News
NIFA Invests $9M in Extension, Education and USDA Climate Hubs Partnership
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Climate Analog Academy Recruitment
If you are interested in being contacted directly regarding 2024 or 2025 recruitment or eligibility or would like to get on a list to be notified for 2025 Academy recruitment, please complete the form below.