Putting The Private Sector At The Centre Of Climate Smart Agriculture

This brief draws on three cases to show how the private sector contributes to the conceptualisation, design, delivery and evaluation of climate-smart agricultural interventions and can help bring them to scale. Engaging the private sector in CSA interventions enhances the applicability – and thus the sustainability of interventions, increases uptake and delivers a triple win for donors, beneficiaries and the private sector. They emphasise that private-sector players will be more likely to engage in scaling-up of CSA when they can see a compelling business case to justify their investments.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This volume shares new data relating to Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA), with emphasis on experiences in Eastern and Southern Africa. The book is a collection of research by authors from over 30 institutions, spanning the public and private sectors, with specific knowledge on agricultural development in the region discussed. The material is assembled to answer key questions on the following five topic areas: (1) Climate impacts: What are the most significant current and near future climate risks undermining smallholder livelihoods? (2) Varieties: How can climate-smart varieties be delivered quickly and cost-effectively to smallholders? (3) Farm management: What are key lessons on the contributions from soil and water management to climate risk reduction and how should interventions be prioritized? (4) Value chains: How can climate risks to supply and value chains be reduced? and (5) Scaling up: How can most promising climate risks reduction strategies be quickly scaled up and what are critical success factors? Readers who will be interested in this book include students, policy makers, and researchers studying climate change impacts on agriculture and agricultural sustainability.

Large and growing numbers of poor rural households depend on climate-sensitive agriculture and operate on the margins of the mainstream economy. This combined with a broken public extension service and faltering international development efforts places millions of smallholder farmers at disproportionately high risk from a changing climate. Acknowledging the magnitude of the challenge and the required pace and scale of response, coupled with honest introspection on past performance, has prompted the need to look beyond the public sector for delivering climate-smart solutions. Harnessing the financial, technological and intellectual capital in the private sector to complement public sector-driven climate responses is a new dimension in delivery of sustainable climate-smart solutions at scale.

Sustainable intensification is predicated on climate-smart agricultural input adoption. We test strategies for promoting the adoption of climate-smart agricultural inputs in Nigeria with a private sector firm. We disentangle the effects of price discount promotions (25 percent discounts) relative to the firm’s standard “business as usual” marketing package. We find that the standard marketing package increases the adoption of climate-smart urea super granule (USG) fertilizer by 24 percentage points while reducing prilled urea utilization by 17 percentage points. Discounts increase adoption of USG by an additional eight percentage points, but are not profitable for the input supply firm as a scalable marketing strategy. Although treatment reduces nitrogen runoff damages valued between USD 43 and 113 per hectare, it did not lead to increased rice yields for farmers.

Increasing food production in the face of a growing population, while adapting to and mitigating climate change constitutes a main challenge for the global agricultural sector. This study identifies, analyses and contextualizes regional initiatives related to agriculture and climate change in developing countries. In order to identify needs for improvements and possibilities for replication or scale-up, a review of recently launched initiatives is combined with a SWOT analysis. Moreover, the study places initiatives in the context of INDCs of Sub-Saharan African countries submitted under the UNFCCC. As a result, recommendations on how to develop and implement best practice agriculture climate change initiatives are presented.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO license. The book uses an economic lens to identify the main features of climate-smart agriculture (CSA), its likely impact, and the challenges associated with its implementation. Drawing upon theory and concepts from agricultural development, institutional, and resource economics, this book expands and formalizes the conceptual foundations of CSA. Focusing on the adaptation/resilience dimension of CSA, the text embraces a mixture of conceptual analyses, including theory, empirical and policy analysis, and case studies, to look at adaptation and resilience through three possible avenues: ex-ante reduction of vulnerability, increasing adaptive capacity, and ex-post risk coping. The book is divided into three sections. The first section provides conceptual framing, giving an overview of the CSA concept and grounding it in core economic principles. The second section is devoted to a set of case studies illustrating the economic basis of CSA in terms of reducing vulnerability, increasing adaptive capacity and ex-post risk coping. The final section addresses policy issues related to climate change. Providing information on this new and important field in an approachable way, this book helps make sense of CSA and fills intellectual and policy gaps by defining the concept and placing it within an economic decision-making framework. This book will be of interest to agricultural, environmental, and natural resource economists, development economists, and scholars of development studies, climate change, and agriculture. It will also appeal to policy-makers, development practitioners, and members of governmental and non-governmental organizations interested in agriculture, food security and climate change.

Given its heavy reliance on rainfed agriculture and projected climatic and weather changes, SSA faces multidimensional challenges in ensuring food and nutrition security as well as preserving its ecosystems. In this regard, climate-smart agriculture (CSA) can play an important role in addressing the interlinked challenges of food security and climate change. CSA practices aim to achieve three closely related objectives: sustainably increase agricultural productivity, adapt to climate change, and mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The CSA objectives directly contribute to achieving the 2014 Malabo Declaration goals, which include commitments to (1) end hunger in Africa by 2025, (2) halve poverty by 2025 through inclusive agricultural growth and transformation, and (3) enhance the resilience of livelihoods and production systems to climate variability and other related risks. These linkages underscore the importance of including CSA in country and regional plans to achieve overarching development objectives in Africa, in particular food security and poverty reduction. The 2016 Annual Trends and Outlook Report (ATOR) examines the contribution of CSA to meeting Malabo Declaration goals by taking stock of current knowledge on the effects of climate change, reviewing existing evidence of the effectiveness of various CSA strategies, and discussing examples of CSA-based practices and tools for developing evidence-based policies and programs.

This publication describes climate-smart agriculture (CSA) case studies from around the world, showing how the approach is implemented to address challenges related to climate change and agriculture. The case studies operationalize the five action points for CSA implementation: expanding the evidence base for CSA, supporting enabling policy frameworks, strengthening national and local institutions, enhancing funding and financing options, and implementing CSA practices at field level. The publication provides examples of the innovative roles that farmers, researchers, government officials, private sector agents and civil society actors can play to transform food systems and help meet the Sustainable Development Goals; it also demonstrates how these actors can collaborate. The case studies discuss context-specific activities that sustainably increase agricultural productivity and incomes, adapt and build resilience of people and food systems to climate change, and reduce and/or remove greenhouse gas emissions where possible.