Purpose

ClimateSmartAdvisors is a Horizon Europe funded project, which will run from April 2023 – March 2030. The key objective of the project is to form a network of advisors, and support advisors’ capacity building in providing targeted climate smart advice to farmers. More specifically, we aim to support capacity building of 1500 climate smart advisors, through a combination of dedicated trainings and extensive peer-to-peer learning activities in the form of advisory communities of practice. The project is still in a very early stage, but we will present the outlined approach for 3 key elements of the project: first, Communities of Practice as main unit for capacity building of advisors involved in the project; second, the connection and exchange between ClimateSmartAdvisors, and its’ two sister projects (Climate Farm Demo  - network of pilot demonstration farmers, and ClimateSmartExperiments (TBC) – network of research stations); and third, the monitoring, evaluation and learning approach that will be implemented in connection to the various capacity building activities. Through an early connection and engagement with the ESEE community, we expect to optimize and finetune our current outlined approaches for each of these key elements and provide an inspiring discussion on strengthen advise for climate smart agriculture.

Format

We will organise an Interactive discussion session. For each of the key elements, we will first give a short presentation on the planned approach, followed by a facilitated discussion. During this facilitated discussion, we will use the 6 thinking hats of de Bono[1], to reflect on the approach for each of the key elements. The Six Thinking Hats technique allows to invite the participants to look at each of the approaches in six different ways, jointly exploring a range of perspectives: 1) the factual hat: what do we know, what don’t we know and how will we get the information we need; 2) the feelings hat: represents feelings and instincts, without the need for logical justification; 3) the optimist’s hat: looking at the approaches in a positive light, focusing on benefits and added value; 4) the judge’s hat: focus on critical judgement, being cautious and assessing risks, giving clear explanations for those concerns;  5) the creative hat: focuses on exploring ideas, alternatives and possibilities; and 6) the conductor’s hat: managing the decision-making process and planning for action.