Climate Smart Farmers Village: The role of weather schools on firm livelihoods of smallholder farmers in peri-urban Khulna

Coastal farmers are very vulnerable to hydroclimatic variability and climate change impacts in the Bengal Delta (Dasgupta et al., 2015). The delta farmers depend on the seasonal rainfall for agricultural practices (Kabir et al., 2016) and suffer from recurrent hydroclimatic events such as heavy rainfall, drought, cyclones, storm surge, waterlogging, and salinity intrusion (Salam et al, 2019). Agricultural practices of smallholders are becoming challenging due to unpredictable hydroclimatic variabilities such as unexpected rainfall and extreme climatic events (Islam and Hasan, 2016). These hydroclimatic variabilities severely affect agricultural income and livelihood security, especially poor farming communities (Huq et al., 2015). While hydroclimatic information services with available information and communication technology (ICT) can potentially assist farmers to manage these hydroclimatic risks and informed decision-making, currently, smallholders do not have access to location- and time-specific hydroclimatic information services in advance time-scale and in a meaningful (useful and useable) way. Understanding farmer needs and capacity, decision-making processes, and policy are also fundamental challenges for smallholder farmers. There is a scientific challenge for hydroclimate information services for smallholders and bridges between the available model-based forecasts and the local context and capabilities. Thus, the central question is how hydroclimatic information services can be adapted in ways that local farmers find useful in decision-making processes for their crops and livelihood activities.

• Supervision