Smart Agro VETs: Climate change adversely affects the socio-economic
Climate change adversely affects the socio-economic development in rural areas due to the decrease in water resources, agricultural production and labor. Sudden temperature changes, seasonal fluctuations and natural disasters such as floods, hails, storms, etc. lead to decrease in the production efficiency in agriculture and water scarcity. Creating awareness on climate change adaptation and raising human resources to fulfill these adaptations in agriculture has gained importance. Unfortunately, the curriculums of the agricultural vocational high schools do not raise students by addressing these contemporary climate change problems. This gap between the VET system and the agriculture sector causes inefficient use of scarce resources and makes rural areas vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change. At this point, our project aims to enhance the capability of climate change adaptation and struggle with these unfavorable effects through VET learning on agricultural water-use efficiency in rural areas. In this respect, the needs that our project address are as in following: The current curriculums of agricultural VET system, especially in Turkey, are not up-to-date and do not address effective solutions for climate change adaptation on agriculture There is a lack of a holistic, inclusive and innovative policy recommendation for VET system in line with climate change adaptation The technical and institutional capacity of agricultural VET schools are not well-equipped VET trainers and providers’ knowledge and competencies on smart farming perspective to struggle with the adverse effects of climate change are not sufficient VET students’ attraction and sensitivity to create sustainable agricultural environment is low.