Climate Smart Agriculture

The climate-smart agriculture (CSA) concept is gaining considerable traction at international and national levels to meet the challenges of addressing agricultural planning under climate change. CSA is a concept that calls for integration of the need for adaptation and the possibility of mitigation in agricultural growth strategies to support food security. Several countries around the world have expressed intent to adopt CSA approach to managing their agricultural sectors. However there is considerable confusion about what the CSA concept and approach actually involve, and wide variation in how the term is used. It is critical to build a more formal basis for the CSA concept and methodology and at the same time providing illustrations of how the concept can be applied across a range of conditions. This book expand and formalize the conceptual foundations of CSA drawing upon theory and concepts from agricultural development, institutional and resource economics. The book is also devoted to a set of country level case studies illustrating the economic basis of CSA in terms of reducing vulnerability, increasing adaptive capacity and ex-post risk coping. It also addresses policy issues related to climate change focusing on the implications of the empirical findings for devising effective strategies and policies to support resilience and the implications for agriculture and climate change policy at national, regional and international levels. The book provide development agencies and practitioners, policymakers, civil society, research and academia as well as private sector with tested good practices and innovative approaches of promoting CSA system at country level.

Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) is an approach to guide the management of agriculture in the era of climate change. The concept was first launched in 2009, and since then has been reshaped through inputs and interactions of multiple stakeholders involved in developing and implementing the concept. CSA aims to provide globally applicable principles on managing agriculture for food security under climate change that could provide a basis for policy support and recommendations by multilateral organizations, such as UN’s FAO. The major features of the CSA approach were developed in response to limitations in the international climate policy arena in the understanding of agriculture’s role in food security and its potential for capturing synergies between adaptation and mitigation. Recent controversies which have arisen over CSA are rooted in longstanding debates in both the climate and sustainable agricultural development policy spheres. These include the role of developing countries, and specifically their agricultural sectors, in reducing global GHG emissions, as well as the choice of technologies which may best promote sustainable forms of agriculture. Since the term ʻCSA’ was widely adopted before the development of a formal conceptual frame and tools to implement the approach, there has been considerable variation in meanings applied to the term, which also contributed to controversies. As the body of work on the concept, methods, tools and applications of the CSA approach expands, it is becoming clearer what it can offer. Ultimately, CSA’s utility will be judeged by its effectiveness in integrating climate change response into sustainable agricultural development strategies on the ground.

Climate change, especially through greater frequency and intensity of climate extremes, is expected to negatively impact agriculture and food security, particularly in developing countries highly dependent on rain-fed agriculture. Promoting growth and food security must draw on the rich literature of the past 50–60 years while also addressing potential structural shifts in the factors that promote growth. This paper summarizes the economic considerations of Climate Smart Agriculture, a concept developed by the FAO to address the complex issue of how to achieve sustainable agricultural growth for food security under climate change. It addresses the lack of coherence on the CSA approach by building a formal basis of the CSA concept and methodology. We do this by posing a dynamic optimization problem wherein a social planner seeks to maximize expected discounted welfare associated with agriculture of the population they serve, both now and in the future. We analyze constraints, choices, and features of design of CSA to illustrate on the concept can be applied across a range of locations and conditions. This has implications for research, innovation, and policy design.

Climate change impacts on agriculture are varied over space and time. The effects are heterogeneous and highly uncertain. Innovation in agriculture is clearly an important response for effective and equitable adaptation and mitigation – and we need to rethink how to promote innovation to address the heterogeneity and uncertainty of climate change impacts. In moving towards climate smart agricultural (CSA) systems in developing and developed countries, innovation will be key. For CSA we will need greater resilience in agricultural systems and also greater efficiency of resource use for both adaptation and mitigation. Technological innovation will need to play a key role – but its not enough. Managerial and institutional innovations are likely to be even more important in dealing with the heterogeneous and uncertain impacts of climate change. Innovation can complement other forms of adaptation to climate change to form CSA practices. In particular innovation can enhance technology adoption, may prevent or facilitate migration of production/population, enhance trade & aid, and increase efficiency of insurance & feasibility of inventories. We discuss their main features and the nature of innovation needed to align these actions with a CSA strategy.

Satellite derived measurements are essential inputs to monitor water management and agricultural production for improving regional food security. Near real-time satellites observations can be used to mitigate the adverse impacts of extreme events and promote climate resilience. Population growth and demand of resources in developing countries will increase vulnerability in agriculture production and are likely to be exacerbated by the effects of climate change. This paper introduces wetness and temperature products as important factors in decision and policy making, especially in regions with sparse surface observations. These objective satellite data serve as: (1) an early detector of growing conditions and thus food supply; (2) an index for insurance programs (i.e. risk management) that can more quickly trigger release of catastrophic bonds to farmers to mitigate crop failure impact; (3) an important educational and informational tool in crop selection, resource management, and other adaptation or mitigation strategies; (4) an important tool in food aid and transport; (5) and management of water resource allocation. The two new indices (surface wetness and temperature) are meant to complement currently available datasets, such as the greenness index, soil moisture measurements, and river guages.

As part of the Regional Rice Initiative Pilot Project, UNFAO has committed resources to support policy dialog and decision capacity related to climate change adaptation and mitigation in agriculture, with particular attention to food security and the rice sector in Asia and the Pacific. This initiative includes sponsorship of research to deliver information and knowledge products for policy makers to better manage climate risks to the rice sector and identify adaptation needs for the rice sector in Lao PDR. In the following pages, we report on progress of one component of this activity, econometric estimation of long term impacts that climate change can be expected to have on rice yields. The work reported here is preliminary and should not in its current form be used as a basis for policy.

The perceptions of climate change and adaptation choices made by farmers are important considerations in the design of adaptation strategies by policy makers and agricultural extension services. This paper seeks to determine these perceptions and choices by farmers in already poor environmental regions of Thailand and Vietnam especially vulnerable to climate change. Overall findings were that farmers do perceive climate change, but describe it in quite distinct ways and that location influences how farmers recognize climate change. Our 2007 and 2013 surveys show that farmers are adapting, but it is difficult to determine if specific practices are “climate smart”. Further, adaptation measures are informed by perception and, at least in the case of Vietnam, perceptions are shaped by the respondent’s characteristics, location variables and recent climate related shocks. Finally, the three climate variables of rainfall, temperature, and wind are the most important factors in explaining specific adaptation measures chosen by farmers. Farmer participation is an essential part of public actions designed to allow adaptation to climate change. Our research can also contribute to understanding farmer constraints and tailoring good overall strategies to the local heterogeneity of vulnerable locations.

Climate change and enhanced climate variability will have differing impacts on agricultural producers worldwide. The increasing utilization of precision farming and mobile technologies, together with improvements in data management software, offer expanding opportunities for an integrated data platform that links farm-level management decisions and corresponding behavioral changes to site-specific biophysical data and analytical tools. The goals of this paper are to illustrate how decision support tools can be designed to address the farm-scale economic and environmental tradeoffs associated with changes in climatic conditions and how these farm-scale tools could be linked with regional based analyses to scale up to the information needed for better science-based policy.

Can insurance cost-effectively mitigate the increasingly deleterious impacts of climate risk on poverty and food insecurity? The theory reviewed in this chapter suggests an affirmative answer if well-designed insurance contracts can be implemented and priced at a reasonable level despite the uncertainties that attend climate change. Evidence from the IBLI index insurance project in the pastoral regions in East Africa suggest that these practical difficulties can be overcome and that insurance can have the impacts that underlay the positive theoretical evaluation. At the same time, continuing analysis of the IBLI experience suggests that much remains to be done if quality index insurance contracts are to be scaled up and sustained. We conclude that insurance is not an easy, off-the-shelf solution to the problem of climate risk and food insecurity. Creativity in the technical and institutional design of contracts is still required, as are efforts to forge the more effective public-private partnerships needed to price insurance at levels that will allow insurance to fulfill its potential as part of an integrated approach to social protection and food security in an era of climate change.

Several new initiatives of cash transfer programmes have recently emerged in sub-Saharan Africa, and most target poor rural households dependent on subsistence agriculture. This paper synthesizes the key findings of From Protection to Production Project (PtoP) of FAO and discusses the role of cash transfer programmes risk management tool to increase resilience in sub-Saharan Africa. Results show that such programmes have important implications for household resilience. Although the impacts on risk management are less uniform, the cash transfer programmes seem to strengthen community ties (via increased giving and receiving of transfers) and allow households to save and pay off debts, and decrease the need to rely on adverse risk coping mechanisms. One important finding related to climate change, as illustrated by the Zambia case, is that households receiving cash transfers suffered much less from weather shocks, with poorest households as the biggest gains, and food security increased, although differing across countries. The paper concludes that social protection programmes could be more effective as safety nets by explicitly accounting for climate risk in their design and implementation.

The achievement of Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) goals in Africa will require widespread farmer adoption of practices and technologies that promote resilience and system-wide collective action to promote ex ante climate risk management activities and ex post coping strategies. Leveraging public sector resources is critical to achieve goals at scale. This study examines the scope for input subsidy programs (ISPs) to contribute to achieving CSA objectives in Africa. Available evidence to date suggests that in most cases ISPs have had either no effect on or have reduced SSA smallholders’ use of potentially CSA practices. However, recent innovations in ISPs may promote some climate smart objectives by contributing to system-level ex-ante risk management. In particular, restricted voucher systems for improved seed types that utilize private sector distribution supply chains may prove capable of promoting CSA goals. Generally, moving from systems that prescribe a fixed input packet to a flexible system with a range of input choices holds promise, but fixed systems still hold some benefits. Conditional ISPs would require improved monitoring and compliance as well as defining practices with clearly measurable productivity benefits vis-à-vis CSA goals. The potential of ISPs to achieve widespread CSA benefits must address these challenges and be evaluated against benefits of investments in irrigation, physical infrastructure, and public agricultural research and extension, which may generate higher comprehensive social benefits.

Adaptation options that work reasonably well across an entire range of potential outcomes are shown to be preferable in a context of deep uncertainty. This is because robust practices that are expected to perform satisfactorily across the full range of possible future conditions, are preferable to those that are the best ones, but just in one specific scenario. Thus, using a Robust Decision Making Approach in Nigerian agriculture may increase resilience to climate change. To illustrate, the expansion of irrigation might be considered as a complementary strategy to conservation techniques and a shift in sowing/planting dates to enhance resilience of agriculture. However, given large capital expenditures, irrigation must consider climate trends and variability. Using historical climate records is insufficient to size capacity and can result in “regrets” when the investment is undersized/oversized, if the climate turns out to be drier/wetter than expected. Rather utilizing multiple climate outcomes to make decisions will decrease “regrets.” This chapter summarizes the main results from a study titled “Toward climate-resilient development in Nigeria” funded by the Word Bank (See Cervigni et al. 2013).

The predicted effects of climate change call for a multi-dimensional method to assess the performance of various agricultural systems across economic, environmental and social dimensions. Climate smart agriculture (CSA) recognizes that the three goals of climate adaptation, mitigation and resilience must be integrated into the framework of a sustainable agricultural system. However, current methods to determine a systems’ ability to achieve CSA goals are lacking. This paper presents a new simulation-based method based on the Regional Integrated Assessment (RIA) methods developed by the Agricultural Model Inter-comparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) for climate impact assessment. This method combines available data, field- and stakeholder-based surveys, biophysical and economic models, and future climate and socio-economic scenarios. It features an integrated farm and household approach and accounts for heterogeneity across biophysical and socioeconomic variables as well as temporal variability of climate indicators. This method allows for assessment of the technologies and practices of an agricultural system to achieve the three goals of CSA. The case study of a mixed crop livestock system in western Zimbabwe is highlighted as a typical smallholder agricultural systems in Africa.

Food supply chains are essential to food security in developing regions where today the great majority of food consumed is purchased from rural-urban, rural-rural, and urban-rural supply chains. Disrupting those supply chains means disrupting food security. Yet short-term climate shocks and long-term climate change threaten to cause that disruption. This chapter does four things: (1) analyzes the types and determinants of vulnerabilities of food supply chains to climate shocks and change; (2) considers how those vulnerabilities are conditioned by urbanization, diet change, and rapid transformation of food systems; (3) discusses how supply chain actors, from farmers to processors and distributors and input suppliers, invest in mitigation of the risks of these shocks and reduction of their vulnerabilities; (4) discusses policy implications and lays out an agenda for research for climate smart food supply chains in developing regions.

Climate change adds to the existing challenges in improving crop productivity and welfare for smallholder agricultural households by affecting the mean and variability of weather conditions and the frequency of extreme weather events. In the face of such growing uncertainty, agricultural practices of small landholders need to be adapted to better manage the changing risk structures. Since government risk management programs may complement or substitute for farmer adaptation, this chapter examines how a range of institutional interventions might assist, obstruct, channel, or change smallholder agricultural adaptation to climate change. Taken together, our results underscore the importance of the informational role of the agriculture extension, suggest that insurance can lead to significant changes in farmer planting and land management decisions, and show how information about changing conditions and insurance can be complimentary in driving changes in farmer behavior.

The mixed crop-livestock systems of the developing world will become increasingly important for meeting the food security challenges of the coming decades. The synergies and trade-offs between food security, adaptation, and mitigation objectives are not well studied, however. Comprehensive evaluations of the costs and benefits, and the synergies and trade-offs, of different options in developing-country mixed systems do not exist as yet. Here we summarise what we know about the climate smartness of different alternatives in the mixed crop-livestock systems in developing countries, based on published literature supplemented by a survey of experts. We discuss constraints to the uptake of different interventions and the potential for their adoption, and highlight some of the technical and policy implications of current knowledge and knowledge gaps.

To support countries implementing CSA solutions, the Economics and Policy Innovations for Climate Smart Agriculture (EPIC) group at FAO uses a methodology based on building a solid evidence base. The knowledge gained from datasets that combine household, geographical and climate data helps design policies that enhance food security and climate resilience while also taking advantage of mitigation opportunities to obtain financing. Appropriate application of CSA principles depends on specific conditions that vary between and within countries. Demographic, environmental, economic and institutional factors are all important determinants of the effectiveness of any particular policy. This chapter builds upon econometric results obtained from previous analyses by developing a conceptual model that introduces the temporal aspects of household vulnerability. The method is based on a factorial design with two vulnerability levels (high and low) and two production methods (conventional or business as usual, and improved agricultural management with high CSA potential). Farms are classified into groups based on cluster analysis of survey data from Zambia. Results provide a baseline consisting of probability distributions of yields, labor use, cash inputs and profit for each of the four combinations of vulnerability level and production system. This is useful for stochastic dominance analysis, but additional work is required to incorporate the temporal aspect of the problem. The chapter identifies data gaps and additional analyses required to capture the spatio-temporal aspects of household vulnerability and adaptive capacity.

Weather volatility is increasing, hence the need to build resilience for farmers and the poor, who are affected the most. Using Mali and Nigeria as case study countries, this study shows that climate change may reduce the yield of staple food crops – namely maize, rice, and millet – by 20% in 2050 compared to their levels in 2000. Sustainable land and water management (SLWM) – which includes a combination of organic soil fertility, inorganic fertilizer, and water managements – will more than offset the effect of climate change on yield under the current management practices. Additionally, SLWM is more profitable and could therefore increase household income and address poverty.

Unfortunately, adoption rates of SLWM remain low. Policies and strategies for increasing their adoption includes improvement of market access, enhancing the capacity of agricultural extension service providers to provide advisory services on SLWM, and building an effective carbon market that involves both domestic and international buyers. The recent United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) provides one of the opportunities for reducing climate risks and achieving sustainable agricultural production under climate change.

Central Asia is projected to experience significant climate change, combined with increased weather volatility. Agriculture is a key economic sector and a major source of livelihoods for Central Asia’s predominantly rural population, especially for the poor. Agricultural production, being sensitive to weather shocks and climate volatility, may be negatively affected by climate change if no adaptive actions are taken. Climate smart technologies could help in strengthening the resilience of agricultural producers in the region to increased weather variability due to climate change. This study identifies the key barriers and opportunities for a wider adoption of climate smart technologies and also evaluates their potential impacts on agricultural revenues of differentiated groups of agricultural producers, with a focus on the poor. Adoption of climate smart agricultural technologies was found to raise farming profits of both poorer and richer households, although these positive impacts may likely to be higher for richer households. The study also shows that policies facilitating improved access to markets and agricultural extension services, as well as higher commercialization of household agricultural output may increase the adoption of climate smart agricultural technologies in the region.

Climate variability, associated with farm-income variability, is recognized as one of the main drivers of livelihood diversification strategies in developing countries. In this chapter, we present a synthesis of two comprehensive studies from Zambia and Malawi on the drivers of diversification and its impacts on selected welfare outcomes with a specific attention to climatic variables and institutions. We use geo-referenced farm-household-level data merged with data on historical rainfall and temperature as well as with administrative data on relevant institutions. The two case studies demonstrate that diversification is clearly an adaptation response, as long term trends in climatic shocks have a significant effect on livelihood diversification, albeit with different implications. Whereas the long term variation in growing period rainfall is associated with increased crop, labour and income diversification in Malawi, it is only associated with increased livestock diversification in Zambia. With regard to institutions, we find that access to extension agents positively and significantly correlates with crop diversification in both countries, underlining the role of extension in promoting more resilient farming systems in rural Zambia and Malawi. Fertilizer subsidies are among the most important agricultural policies in both countries, where they significantly affect incentives for income diversification – though in opposing ways – providing important policy implications. The two case studies document distinct ways in which incentives for livelihood diversification (measured along different dimensions) are shaped by increased variability in rainfall and rural institutions. The results also demonstrate that diversification can be an effective adaptation response and the risk-return trade-offs are not as pronounced as might be expected.

The efforts to adapt to climate change in developing countries are in their infancy, and hopefully CSA will be a major contributor to these efforts. But CSA itself is evolving, and there is a growing need to refine and adapt it to the changing realities. This section of the book focus on the implications of the empirical findings for devising effective strategies and policies to support resilience and the implications for agriculture and climate change policy at national, regional and international levels. This section is built upon the analysis provided in the case studies as well as short “think” pieces on specific aspects of the policy relevance issues from policy makers as well as leading experts in agricultural development and climate change. The case study provided concrete illustrations of the conceptual and theoretical framework, taking into account the high level of diversity in agro-ecological and socioeconomic situations faced by agricultural planners and policy-makers today. While the case studies demonstrate the diversity of challenges facing farmers around the world, they also indicate unifying characteristics imposed by climate change on agricultural decision making and the potential for the CSA approach to address them.