Agriculture contributes around 14 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change is a major threat multiplier for global food security, impacting agricultural productivity and the stability of food production. To feed a world of over nine billion people by 2050, today’s agriculture and food production must get ‘climate-smart’ and undergo a step-change in resilience, resource-efficiency, GHG reductions and productivity over the next three decades.
Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is a fundamental lever to how the world combats for climate change, but few people outside the agricultural and research sectors fully understand the principles behind it, creating the need for new educational approaches. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, have exploded in popularity over the past few years and over 58 million students took an online course in 2016.
The “Future of Farming” MOOC was designed and developed by the University of Reading and EIT Climate-KIC. Climate-KIC’s initial funding for the MOOC (via its CSA Booster programme) was crucial and it also contributed to both the content and curation of the course. Content has been contributed by some of Europe’s leading research institutes including, Wageningen University & Research (WUR), INRA-France, and IBIMET. In addition, Climate-KIC’s Europe-wide network of higher education partners and research institutions offer strong international networked demand.
For more details on how to register see here.
