Curated Content

This document is a summary of climate-smart agriculture.

Countries vary in their institutional technical and financial abilities to prepare for climate change in agriculture and to balance food security, adaptation, and mitigation goals.Indicators for climate readiness provide guidance to countries and enable monitoring progress. Readiness assessments can enable donors, investors and national decision-makers to identify where investments are needed or likely to be successful. Examples of climate readiness indicators are provided for five work areas: 1. governance and stakeholder engagement, 2. knowledge and information services, 3. climate-smart agricultural strategy and implementation frameworks, 4. national and subnational capabilities and 5. national information and accounting systems.

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is being widely promoted as a solution for food insecurity and climate change adaptation in food systems of sub-Saharan Africa, while simultaneously reducing the rate of greenhouse gas emissions. Governments throughout Africa are writing policies and programs to promote CSA practices despite uncertainty about the ability for practices to meet the triple CSA objectives of CSA. We conducted a systematic review of 175 peer-reviewed and grey literature studies, to gauge the impact of over seventy potential CSA practices on CSA outcomes in Tanzania and Uganda. Using a total of 6,342 observations, we found that practice impacts were highly context (i.e. farming system and location) specific. Nevertheless, practice effect across CSA outcomes generally agreed in direction. While our results suggest that CSA is indeed possible, lack of mitigation data precludes a more conclusive statement. Furthermore, the inclusion of potential adoption rates changes the potential of CSA practices to achieve benefits at scale. Given the uncertainty and variable impacts of practices across regions and outcomes, it is critical for decision makers to prioritize practices based on their desired outcomes and local context.

Climate-smart agriculture seeks to increase sustainable productivity, strengthen farmers’ resilience, reduce agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions and increase carbon sequestration. It strengthens food security and delivers environmental benefits. Climate-smart agriculture includes proven practical techniques — such as mulching, intercropping, conservation agriculture, crop rotation, integrated crop-livestock management, agroforestry, improved grazing, and improved water management — and innovative practices such as better weather forecasting, more resilient food crops and risk insurance.

This report is the results of a desk based study that reviewed 14 examples of guidance on agriculture and climate adaptation and was commissioned to help inform whether a new Topic Guide would be relevant and useful for DFID. The documents are grouped according to their overall purpose:

Raise awareness (4);

Inform policy (5);

Provide sector strategies (6) and sector-specific guidance (2); and

Define technical procedures and options (1)

Alternate wetting and drying (AWD) is a rice management practice that reduces water use by up to 30% and can save farmers money on irrigation and pumping costs. AWD reduces methane emissions by 48% without reducing yield. Efficient nitrogen use and application of organic inputs to dry soil can further reduce emissions. Incentives for adoption of AWD are higher when farmers pay for pump irrigation.

Conservation agriculture is an approach to agricultural management based on three principles: Minimum soild disturbance, Retention of crop residues or otehr soil surface cover; Use of crop rotations

Coffee-Banana Itercropping is a climate-smart agricultural practice based on indigenous knowledge. It increases farmer incomes, improves resilience to climatic impacts, and sequesters higher amounts of carbon as opposed to monocropping systems. The practice also has positive effects for rural women and household nutrition.

Climate information services (CIS) have emerged as a key input for adaptation decision making aiming to strengthen agricultural livelihoods by managing climate risks. Many pilot projects have been implemented in developing countries to either strengthen existing systems or put in place new systems to deliver climate information to multiple actors. However, scaling up these pilot project-based initiatives in order to contribute further to more sustainable and institutionalized systems remains a challenge. In order to unpack the gap between piloting and successfully up-scaling CIS initiatives, this paper explores the key constraints to and enablers of scaling up CIS by drawing on case studies from research, policy and practice in Africa and South Asia. The evidence contained in this paper was collected through an extensive literature review and from expert opinions elicited during the Ninth International Conference on Community-based Adaptation (CBA9) held in Nairobi in April 2015. We find that transitioning from CIS pilots to systems is possible when scaling up is mainstreamed in the project design stage with a clear financial model for sustainability, includes multiple stakeholders through iterative participatory processes, identifies and engages with pilot-project champions and intermediaries, exploits new communication mechanisms such as information and communication technologies (ICTs), and creates and supports effective partnerships that enable knowledge co-production.

ENGLISH Smallholder farmers are key to food security in sub-Saharan Africa where two thirds of the population depend on small-scale, rain-fed farming as their main source of food and income. Critical farming and household decisions depend upon the weather, for example, how much rain falls, the length and start date of the rainfall season and the timing of dry spells. Such aspects of the weather vary considerably from year to year. The Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture (PICSA) approach aims to facilitate farmers to make informed decisions based on accurate, location specific, climate and weather information; locally relevant crop, livestock and livelihood options; and with the use of participatory tools to aid their decision making. This field manual is a step by step guide to working though the PICSA approach with farmer groups. It is primarily for the use of facilitators (e.g. NGO and extension field staff who have received training in the use of the PICSA approach). The PICSA approach is divided into twelve steps to be carried out with groups of farmers. Due to the location specific nature of PICSA there are a number of preparatory activities that need to be completed before field staff are trained in the approach.