Rural Climate Exchange: A New CGIAR Blog

A collaborative communications initiative strives to better connect international agricultural and environmental science to the climate change agenda.

In a new effort to promote dialogue and information sharing, the CGIAR Secretariat, with support from private-sector partner Burness Communications, launched a new institutional blog in late June, dealing with CGIAR research and other activities that are relevant to global climate change. The blog is hosted on WordPress, a free, open-source platform.

In the first instance, the blog is intended to serve CGIAR staff and stakeholders as an up-to-date resource on relevant research and other developments. In the run up to the15th Conference of Parties (COP15) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which will be held this December in Copenhagen, Denmark, it is especially important that such work and its implications for the COP15 negotiations be made as readily accessible as possible.

Increasingly, the blog should also help feed story ideas to international media, further raising the profile of CGIAR research. Colleagues at Burness are promoting it heavily for this purpose, with good signs of interest from wire services, like the Associated Press, and others.

Considerable effort has gone into creating content for the blog, resulting in an average of three to four posts per week. Communications colleagues at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), World Agroforestry Centre and WorldFish Center have contributed importantly to this effort.

Rural Climate Exchange currently receives an average of just over a thousand visits per month, and the figure is rising steadily, as a result of several measures. Among these are regular updates on recent posts to a climate communications listserv (to which about 35 CGIAR climate change scientists and communications specialists are subscribed); collaboration with other blogs dealing with climate change and related issues; and “live” blogging from major events (like the World Agroforestry Congress described elsewhere in this issue of CGIAR eNews), which taps into the immediate interest of event participants and others.

In the short time since it was launched, the blog has shown good potential for enhancing CGIAR communications on climate change. The Communications Team in the CGIAR Secretariat invites suggestions about ways to improve the content, promotion and use of the blog, and encourages readers of CGIAR eNews to participate in any of the following ways:

• Visit Rural Climate Exchange and offer comments on the posts.
• Let others know about the blog and include links to it on your Web site.
• Subscribe to the climate communications listserve for regular updates on blog posts by sending an email message to Barbara Eckberg (beckberg@worldbank.org), with the subject line “Subscribe to climatecomms@cgiar.org.
• As a listserv subscriber, contribute blog posts actively. For this purpose, send an email to Amelia Goh (agoh@worldbank.org), requesting a username and password for the blog site, so you can post materials yourself, or seeking Amelia’s assistance in posting material for you.