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Using a participatory learning approach, we report on the delivery and evaluation of a climate change and risk assessment tool to help manage water risks within the agricultural sector. Post-graduate water-professional students from a range of countries, from both developed and emerging economies were involved in using this tool. Our approach included participative learning tools -group discussion, software, and risk matrices. The materials developed met the needs of the students, allowing these students to incorporate their learning and adapt the package of materials for use in their home countries. Analysis of evaluations show that the tools and materials are particularly useful and emphasizes the need for sound learning materials and tools, funding to deliver training, and policy support to accelerate education and adoption of authentic climate change adaptation practices. The expected benefits for water professionals about climate change will be translated into improved socioeconomic and environmental outcomes if adopted.

Engineers who design hard real-time embedded systems express a need for several times the performance available today while keeping safety as major criterion. A breakthrough in performance is expected by parallelizing hard real-time applications and running them on an embedded multi-core processor, which enables combining the requirements for high-performance with timing-predictable execution.parMERASA will provide a timing analyzable system of parallel hard real-time applications running on a scalable multicore processor. parMERASA goes one step beyond mixed criticality demands: It targets future complex control algorithms by parallelizing hard real-time programs to run on predictable multi-/many-core processors. We aim to achieve a breakthrough in techniques for parallelization of industrial hard real-time programs, provide hard real-time support in system software, WCET analysis and verification tools for multi-cores, and techniques for predictable multi-core designs with up to 64 cores.

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There are few professional development courses in Australia for the rural sector concerned with climate variability, climate change and sustainable agriculture. The lack of educators with a sound technical background in climate science and its applications in agriculture prevents the delivery of courses either stand-alone or embedded in other courses, and adversely affects the ability of graduating students to apply climate information. This paper presents evidence from a professional development climate course with 20 professional educators and consultants and results from: surveys at the training workshop; from a questionnaire 12 months post-workshop; and a combined interview and survey two years post-workshop. The key finding was that professional development courses specifically addressing climate are essential, while topics should include climate and weather, the impacts of climate on agricultural systems, strategic thinking and planning options available for business. A project undertaken by professionals delivering climate education helped to improve their skills and confidence to deliver other stand-alone climate courses or to embed climate in existing courses. The paper proposes that a suitable resource manual should be 'problem-based' in its design to allow for a broad range of geographic climates, and should address a wide range of agricultural enterprises including livestock production, horticulture and cropping. The authors also propose ways to introduce and integrate applied climate knowledge and skills into the wider community. Possible progress for inter-disciplinary education and the implications from enhancing learning about climate for sustainable agriculture are discussed.