Abu dhabi: Supported by the Agricultural Innovation Mechanism for Scale (AIM for Scale), a collaboration of researchers from Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and the University of Chicago are working to ensure that governments in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) can adopt AI innovations early and build world-class national services-delivering services once limited to places like the US, EU, or Japan.
According to Emirates News Agency, just as climate change brings extreme and unpredictable weather to communities worldwide, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are making it possible to predict these shifting conditions with greater speed, lower cost, and hyper-local precision. This breakthrough promises to extend accurate forecasting to regions that have historically lacked access to advanced technologies.
The pioneering programme, funded by a grant provided by the International Affairs Office at the Presidential Court of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is training staff from national meteorological and hydrological services (NMHS) and ministries of agriculture across low-and-middle-income countries on how to use AI weather forecasting models tailored to their specific needs. Their first cohort-from Bangladesh, Chile, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria-are being trained September 22-26 in the UAE, hosted by MBZUAI and the National Centre of Meteorology (NCM). In the years ahead, additional rounds will expand to 25 more countries, reaching a total of 30 and further broadening reach and impact to potentially millions more farmers.
AIM for Scale is working on the ground with development partners to ensure this effort is scalable, inclusive, and delivers real impact for farmers. Paul Winters, Executive Director of AIM for Scale, states that accurate, high-quality forecasts can unlock better yields, higher incomes, and stronger livelihoods for farmers. By pairing AI innovation with practical agricultural decision-making, the programme creates opportunities for millions of farmers to prosper.
Fundamental to the programme, the team is engaging ministries of agriculture to ensure forecasts can be tailored to the needs of smallholder farmers who are most vulnerable to weather risks. The power of AI is not only in extending access to gold-standard forecasts but also in enabling those forecasts to be generated directly 'in-house' by NMHSs at a lower cost and with greater accuracy. Advanced knowledge of the start of the rainy season, for example, can help farmers plan what crops to plant and when.
The training combines technical expertise with hands-on capacity building, giving national meteorological teams the tools and autonomy to generate and deliver tailored forecasts. The programme also addresses a lack of hardware by providing high-performance multi-GPU laptops to each participant, enabling them to apply and sustain their training back in their home countries.
Alongside MBZUAI, AIM for Scale, UChicago, and NCM, the partnership is convening experts from leading global institutions, including the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), Google DeepMind and Google Research, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), AfriClimate AI, Norwegian Meteorological Institute, and Precision Development (PxD), among others.
Amir Jina, assistant professor at UChicago's Harris School of Public Policy and Chair of AIM for Scale's Technical Panel, highlights this training as a powerful example of how AI can be operationalised for the global good, marking the first time in history that there is a real prospect of democratising access to world-leading forecasts.