“Under climate change environment it is real hard to forecast the future, farmers are the future”. The statement was given by Maik Veste from FarmImpact project in South Africa.

CLIENT II is an International Partnerships for Sustainable Innovation" project funded by Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and aims to promote international partnerships in the fields of climate, environment and energy. German experts and partners in Africa and Asia come and work together to achieve the project goals.

The CLIMAFRI Project, undertaken in West Africa, aims to develop climate-sensitive adaptation strategies in the transboundary Lower Mono river catchment of Togo and Benin. The project involves universities, policymakers and communities. The unique feature of CLIMAFRI project is it's an approach that integrates science-based data with information and knowledge from local stakeholders and communities, to ensure project sustainability. The project results, presented by Yvonne Walz during the Tropentag conference, were promising and possibly would remove the traps for achieving sustainable development goals through overcoming the recurring flood events in areas severe impacts on people and livelihoods.

KlimaLEZ project aims to strengthen the resilience of Central Asia’s agricultural sector by innovative insurance markets against climatic risks, highlighting drought, in particular. The project is currently taking place in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan focuses on wheat and barley as agricultural produce with the potential to win the battle against climate change. Ihtiyor Bobojonov had an opportunity to present how wheat and barley production in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan are excelling. Let’s look forward and see how modern insurance markets will have the impact on food security, climate resilience and sustainable production.

Non-sustainable land use results in not only ecological loss but also economic consequences due to reduced agricultural produce yield. ReKKS is another project from CLIENT II that cooperates and works closely with community, farmers, companies, academia and government to ensure that the results of the intervention will be sustainable under the fear of climate change. Jannis Florian Cartens presented how ReKKs has implemented, and so far achieved, to reduce the fear of climate change and the problem of soil degradation, in the arid steppe regions of Kazakhstan and south-western Siberia, through the change of land use necessitates innovations for sustainable use of agricultural resources. One of the interventions is to promote herbicide use efficiency by coming up with a system that fumigates only targeted plants. Therefore, this reduces pesticide cost and pollution to the environment.

Mercury-AMF Ghana and Burkina Faso are among the countries facing the issues of land degradation and heavy metal pollution due to ongoing mining activities. Mercury-AMF is one of the CLIENT II projects which makes use of Tropical nitrogen-fixing trees to reduce the mercury concentration in the mercury polluted soils of Ghana and Burkina Faso. Legumes, as a nitrogen-fixing plant type, produce large quantities of biomass, therefore having a high capacity for extensive symbiotic Mycorrhizal associations in high mercury-contaminated soils.

During the CLIENT II workshop, Miriam Ehret talked how Network analysis was important to come up with strategies that will influence the political environment so as to promote the project sustainability. How do you involve the small miners in the project?.....“YES, we are working with miners, so far one of our student has worked with them through focus group discussions and in-depth interviews, it is important to include them for the project to sustainability”, Miriam Ehret responded the question from the one of the audience.