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Showing posts with label mitigation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mitigation. Show all posts

Building Women’s Resilience to Climate Change: Lessons from smallholder farmers

Posted by Ricci Symons Wednesday, November 9, 2016 0 comments

By Alessia Valentini

 How to “get real” about investments in gender equality in agriculture was the theme of today’s side event at COP22 on Building Women’s Resilience to Climate Change.

The event brought speakers from CARE International, the CGIAR's Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security Programme (CCAFS) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), shared their experiences and lessons learned on promoting gender equality, looked at what is being done in practice and proposed ways to strengthen gender equality and women’s empowerment in agriculture adaptation programmes.

The main message conveyed by the panellists was that the impacts of climate change and climate variability are differentiated by gender. In fact, investments in smallholder agriculture, which are designed to improve resilience to climate change, are often significantly gender biased in terms of specific activities undertaken. This has implications on income sources and opportunities, livelihood diversification, access to and control over resources and benefits, and on the quality of life for men and women.

Emma Bowa shared experiences on CARE’s gender-responsive actions and said that climate change comes with opportunities which we should make accessible to women.

“What is important is to ensure that men and women sit down and make decisions together to improve their relationships and obtain better results,” said Bowa.

Ilaria Firmian presented IFAD’s gender policy and shared lessons learnt from the Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme (ASAP).


“IFAD’s gender policy is based on promoting economic empowerment, enabling women and men to have an equal voice and influence in rural institutions and organisations, and achieve a more equitable balance in workload,” said Firmian. “The design of IFAD’s ASAP-supported projects is gender-sensitive and follows the agency’s gender policy objectives. However, the imperative for IFAD now is to build a clear understanding of how gender considerations in design translate into practice.”

What is Climate Finance? - Managing the unavoidable...avoiding the unmanageable

Posted by Ricci Symons Tuesday, March 22, 2016 0 comments

Why do we need climate finance?

A world that is out of balance with atmospheric carbon is a world that must adapt.

I know what you are thinking – an increase of two degrees – it doesn’t sound like much, right? But two degrees is the average worldwide. It will be higher in some places, and lower in others. Dry places in Africa will get drier. Wet places in Asia will get wetter. A two degrees warmer world is a world with a 50/50 risk that coral reefs will bleach, and fish stock will migrate. For many small island states, this means that they would lose most of their economic revenues from tourism and fisheries. Mountainous countries such as Bhutan, which experience the melting of glaciers, would experience water shortages and severe difficulties with their hydropower production.

We live in a very uncertain world. A world that needs investment, but in things we haven’t invested in before, or at least never as a priority. Adapting to a world that is two degrees warmer will cost money. Green technologies are expensive.

''We don’t know what climate finance is…but we are sure we need a lot of it''.

So what is climate finance?

There are three prevailing rationales for providing climate finance:
•       Climate justice: Transfer of public resources from north to south to cover the costs of dealing with the long-term impacts of Climate Change.

•       UNFCCC: “New and additional financial resources” by developed countries for the “full incremental costs” of climate change in developing ones.

•       Broadly: Financing for climate change mitigation and adaptation projects and programmes.

In 2014, global climate finance amounted to approximately US$391 billion. It is made up of public and private money. The money is split between financial flows to climate change adaptation and climate change mitigation projects. To date, there is far more investment in mitigation (related mostly to energy and transport systems): US$361 billion versus US$25 billion.

Investing in the climate is fast becoming a popular notion in the private sector. Big businesses like Google and The Rockefeller Foundation are both providing it. But it is by no means mainstreamed. Other foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have thus far stayed out of climate finance.

IFAD partner countries tap into climate finance from multiple sources. The Fund receives donations from a subset of member states who contribute to the Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme (ASAP). There is also the Global Environment Facility, Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF), Special Climate Change Fund (SCCF) and the Adaptation Fund. IFAD uses this money to ''Climate-proof'' its projects, which effectively means these projects are investing in specific activities to reduce risks from extreme weather events, adopt environmentally sustainable landscape and natural resource management practices, and sequester organic carbon.

The amount of money pledged by governments has the potential to make an incredible difference. 
But it needs to be accessed, used judiciously, and replenished.

How does this help smallholder farmers?

For IFAD, climate finance is used to analyse new and emerging risks. The current generation of smallholder farmers are facing a level of threats and uncertainties they’ve never experienced before. Understanding the risks that are emerging in a changing climate is the first step towards preparing for, and adapting to it.

Climate finance can also help to finance new and innovative technologies to manage climate risks, which have not been widely considered in the agricultural sector before. Such technology can take many forms: Solar panels to power lights and heat water; biogas units, that can turn human and animal waste into cooking gas and fertilizer; half-moon- shaped contour bunds that help arrest erosion and turn degraded dry-lands into arable land again; early warning systems, allowing farmers to know when a flood or monsoon is coming; improved storage infrastructure, so that farmers can safely store their harvests before the rains are coming. The list is long, and these are just some of the ways that smallholders can benefit.

Perhaps the most obvious way that smallholder farmers can benefit is through improved yields. Using techniques such as conservation agriculture and agroforestry, farmland can be made more productive. Such techniques protect the agricultural soils from erosion, whilst intensifying production over a small farm area.

Take-away messages

Climate finance is out there. There's a lot of it, and the trend is rising. After Paris's COP21, there is a worldwide commitment to combat climate change and support developing countries in adopting green and resilient development pathways. IFAD is ahead of the curve in making climate finance work for smallholder farmers, but more work is needed. ''Climate finance is most effective when used as an incentive to improve and adjust the approach of other public or private sector investment programmes'', said Gernot Laganda, IFAD's Climate Adaptation Specialist. Basically, you take a rural development project that is under development or already active, and you mould it into a climate-smart programme through the systematic integration of climate finance.

Climate finance is a new source of financing to do development better. Organisations such as IFAD need to adjust their business processes to use it well.


Top five reasons why we love small farmers

Posted by Beate Stalsett Friday, February 12, 2016 1 comments

Written by Sally Martinelli, Simona Siad and Katie Taft

As different cultures celebrate Valentine's Day, IFAD reminds the world of the importance of investing in small farmers. 

At IFAD, we love investing in small farmers. Some of our reasons may be obvious – small family farms feed up to 80 per cent of the population in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, manage a large share of the natural resources and ecosystems, and support the livelihoods of more than 2 billion people. 

Other reasons might be surprising – for instance, did you know behind each box of chocolate is the important work done by a small farmer?

There are so many reasons we believe the world should also love and support small farmers, but here are our top five reasons.

1. Small farming provides rural youth with job opportunities 

In the Near East and North Africa region, seventeen million young people – more than 20 per cent of the population – are without work. Since young people face the highest rates of poverty, they often move away from home to seek opportunity elsewhere. However, when young people work in agriculture, they not only can support themselves, but are more likely to adopt new technologies. This creates better yields, which in turn allows farmers to continue feeding the world's growing population. Rural youth are an important factor in eradicating food insecurity internationally.

IFAD supports the ambition young people have to not only find employment, but to act as entrepreneurs within the industry. The IFAD Rural Youth Economic Empowerment Programme (RYEEP) combines IFAD's knowledge of rural development with the expertise of two entrepreneurship-focused social enterprises to create employment opportunities for more than 18,000 rural youth between the ages 15 and 35.

2. Small farmers contribute to climate change mitigation 

Climate change is the biggest threat humanity faces today and small farmers are on the front lines to battle it. Rural farmers are guardians of natural resources, often managing vast areas of land and forest. Improving land management and farming practices and planting forests can help lower greenhouse gas emissions. Small farmers are combating the effects of climate change by implementing new farming techniques.

In pursuing its target to reduce 80 million tons of C02e by 2020, IFAD is supporting small farmers with adaptation projects that could reduce emission by 30 million tons. These initiatives includes planting trees and creating natural barriers against flooding and unpredictable rains, using crops that are adapted to resist climate change, and other solutions to address short-and-long-term problems.

3. Small farmers produce much of the world's cocoa (and chocolate) 

The world spends US$83 billion each year on chocolate. Europeans especially love chocolate, eating one kilogram of it every month. This industry depends on the five million small-scale family farmers who grow 90 per cent of the world's cocoa. IFAD is helping cocoa farmers in 12 countries to overcome problems such as pests, disease and unsustainable production methods that harm the harvest and local environment. In São Tomé, IFAD has formed a relationship with the local farmers to connect their high-quality cocoa with Fair Trade buyers such as Kaoka. These efforts have helped nearly 2,000 farming families in São Tomé to revitalize their cocoa industry and produce 1,200 tons of cocoa in 2014.

Fatima, small farmer from São Tomé 

4. Small farmers contribute to global food security 

The population of the planet is expected to grow to almost 9.5 billion people by 2050. Food production will need to nearly double in developing countries to feed this population and address existing hunger and malnutrition. Since most of the world’s farms are small, investing in them will be the only way to address this growing demand.

In Cuba, an IFAD-funded project has organized 157 farming cooperatives to increase the production and productivity of crops such as maize and beans. The Cooperative Rural Development Project in the Oriental Region (PRODECOR) supports the country — which imports 80 per cent of its basic food requirements — to address food insecurity. The population has been impeded by intense drought due to climate change and limited agricultural machinery. With the use of new technologies and the pooling of knowledge, these cooperatives are expected to benefit over 52,000 people.

5. Small farmers preserve biodiversity 

Biodiversity is an essential part of preserving the planet. Changes to an environment such as the loss of a plant or species has the potential to derail the balance of the whole region. When family farmers take the necessary steps to secure their local environment, they not only ensure that their crops yield bountiful harvests, but that there will be future harvests too.

With the support of IFAD, small farmers in Brazil have implemented new agricultural practices that are more environmentally friendly. Over the course of nine years, the region saw a 69 per cent reduction in land erosion, and carbon sequestration ranging from 15 to 79 per cent. In the 20,000 hectares of saved and preserved land, there has been an increase in diverse species of 11 per cent.


Rural smallholder farmers have big potential to reduce agriculture’s carbon footprint

Posted by Ricci Symons Wednesday, July 8, 2015 0 comments

Helping farmers adapt to the impacts of climate change can also significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions – which is good news for the planet and for future generations, says the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).

Speaking at UNESCO’s Our Common Future Under Climate Change Science Conference in Paris, CCAFS and IFAD have released details of their latest research on what mitigation potential smallholder farming actually has. 

The study finds reducing emissions may not be as big a burden as some may believe. The Mitigation Advantage Report has found that mitigation could be another benefit of adaptation activities. The study, released today, examines IFAD’s portfolio of projects focused on making smallholder agriculture more resilient to climate change.

The Mitigation Advantage Report shows that thirteen IFAD-supported adaptation projects could reduce CO2e emissions by 30 million tons. This represents about 38 per cent of IFAD’s target to reduce 80 million tons of CO2e by 2020 under its Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme (ASAP).

Whilst IFAD’s investments are focusing on the key priorities of rural poverty reduction, climate change adaptation and food security, the mitigation target set by the organisation shows how resilient, climate-smart agriculture can make a substantive contribution to the global fight to curb greenhouse gas emissions.   

“What this report shows is that smallholder farmers are a key part of the solution to the climate change challenge,” says IFAD’s Vice President Michel Mordasini. “With the right investments, smallholders can feed a growing planet while at the same time restoring degraded ecosystems and reducing agriculture's carbon footprint.”

IFAD’s climate change adaptation initiatives include improved agronomic practices, afforestation and rehabilitation of degraded lands. These practices help address farmers’ immediate needs, like dealing with unpredictable rains, and gradual shifts in crop suitability.

If smallholder adaptation can help reduce global emissions, there could be new opportunities, according to CCAFS Head of Research, Sonja Vermeulen.

“Currently over 90 per cent of public and private climate funds go to mitigation, not adaptation. For future food security it would be very helpful if the majority of the world’s farmers, who are smallholders, could access those funds,” she said.

IFAD is supporting projects in over 40 countries through its innovative climate financing mechanism, the Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme (ASAP). Launched in 2012, ASAP has become the largest global financing source dedicated to supporting the adaptation of poor smallholder farmers to climate change.


Finding the right mix of climate-smart solutions in East Africa

Posted by daniela cuneo Monday, June 23, 2014 0 comments

June 12, 2014
by Melissa Reichwage

@IFAD/Siegfried Modola
Farming systems that integrate crops with livestock carry much of the weight of the world’s food systems. These “mixed” farming systems produce about half of the planet’s food on 2.5 billion hectares. They not only account for over 90% of the world’s milk supply and 80% of the meat from ruminants but also provide most of the staple crops consumed by poor people, including maize, rice, sorghum, and millet.

Given their importance and vulnerability to climate variability, smallholder mixed crop-livestock systems should be a primary target for strategies to produce more food while taking less from the land.

Climate change is happening even faster and with more damaging effects on the world’s food security than previously anticipated, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s most authoritative body on climate change science.

Agricultural research for development can make a big difference at every step from field to fork by, for example, providing new strategies that help smallholder farmers balance the needs of livestock and crops or by encouraging and guiding investments and policy. Scientists have identified a number of adaptation options: including better technologies, such as drought-tolerant crops; behavior changes, as in diets; improved land management practices; and new policies to foster market and infrastructure development.

@IFAD

One of the biggest challenges in implementing climate-smart agriculture is ensuring that solutions are locally appropriate. “Dozens of activities can help crop-livestock farmers adapt to climate change or reduce their emissions, while boosting their food security. But there is no fixed package of interventions or a one-size-fits-all approach,” said Leigh Winowiecki, a CIAT soil scientist, who is working on the project.


By linking social and ecological tools and datasets, CIAT and partners are identifying and scaling out context-specific strategies for climate-smart agriculture.

The “Increasing food security and farming system resilience in East Africa through wide-scale adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices” project led by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), through the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), specifically its Flagship 4 on policies and institutions for climate-resilient food systems, is being supported by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

Over the next 3 years, the project will work closely with IFAD and national and international partners in Tanzania and Uganda to scale up climate-smart options. An assessment of the impacts and suitability of these options at the local level will help mixed system smallholders, especially women and marginalized groups, make better choices about a number of practices and techniques on offer, based on their real needs. The innovative approach includes spatially explicit monitoring and modeling of land health and agronomic suitability, and on-farm participatory research to ensure the success of the practices on the ground.

By working with farmers and local, regional, national, and international partners to mix and match the most locally appropriate solutions, climate-smart agriculture is becoming a bit smarter.


Learn more about CIAT’s partnership with IFAD in the Stewardship Report outlining our shared vision of a world without poverty and hunger.


Originally posted on CIAT website

Climate smart agriculture, additionality and business as usual

Posted by Jeffrey A Brez Monday, October 10, 2011 1 comments

by Dr. Bruce Campbell, Director, CGIAR Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS)

In one workshop session at the Bonn SBSTA one participant said “We are doing nothing new”. In the Second Global AgriKnowledge Share Fair, held late last month at IFAD headquarters in Rome, participants in one session felt that “perhaps 80% of climate smart agriculture (CSA) is made up of what we already know how to do and are trying to do”. I realise this refers to the proven technologies and practices that can be called upon in CSA, but we also have to consider “additionality”. “Additionality” is a keyword in climate change negotiations. Additionality can be defined as the extent to which a new input adds to the existing inputs (instead of replacing any of them) and results in a greater aggregate. The word is applied to climate finance – the call for developed countries to provide, “new and additional” climate change financing to developing countries. And it is also a key word applied to mitigation interventions – the interventions must reduce greenhouse gas emissions compared to business as usual (or compared to the agreed baseline). Additionality is less frequently applied to adaptation, but even here it has been raised; and it is only time before metrics will be needed to show how climate finance has improved adaptive capacity (e.g., see the chapter on MRV in the Meridian Institute Report on Agriculture and Climate Change) http://www.climate-agriculture.org/~/media/Files/Projects/CCAg%20microsite/Agriculture%20and%20Climate%20Change%20Scoping%20Report%2012%20July%202011.pdf).

So why is “climate-smart agriculture” additional to business as usual? CSA includes the explicit recognition that there are three (or more) outcomes that are sought, two of which are climate-related. There are the business as usual outcomes associated with agricultural development – e.g. production increases, improved agricultural markets, enhanced food security, empowered farmer organisations etc. Then there are the climate change outcomes – enhanced adaptation to climate change, and enhanced contribution of agriculture to climate change mitigation.

And, invariably, when we seek to enhance more than one outcome there will be trade-offs that have to be dealt with. To illustrate some of these – rising temperatures in the Indo-Gangetic plains mean that wheat may need to be planted earlier, but the easy way to do that is to burn the rice residues of the previous crop, thus increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Movement of potato farmers up the Andes to escape the pests and diseases from a warming world will result in the destruction of carbon-rich grasslands. Crop insurance may help deal with crop failures due to extreme events in the short term, but may in the long term be maladaptive – the real solution being more transformative adaptation (changing crop species, out-migration etc). So, CSA is different from business as usual in that the trade-offs amongst production increases, adaptation and mitigation are explicitly recognised and dealt with, both for short and long time scales.

CSA is also not business as usual in terms of the partnerships needed to foster outcomes. The climate science community and meteorological departments need to be more closely involved with the agricultural community – for providing meaningful seasonal, near-term and decadal forecasts of climate which are essential if adaptation to increased variability and progressive climate change is to be successful. Given the predicted increase in frequency and severity of extremes, much more attention has to be given to climate risk management. This also needs better partnerships with the crisis response community and insurance sector. We also have to bring in a completely different group of scientists – those dealing with measuring greenhouse gas emissions.

There are many technologies and practices that are known that can be brought to bear on CSA. But CSA is not business as usual, as there are also many technologies and practices that are not climate-smart! Fertiliser subsidies may enhance food production outcomes but will often result in increased greenhouse gas emissions. Building large irrigation schemes in regions where rivers are likely to dry will do nothing for adaptation over the longer term. Promoting crops and livestock that are increasingly difficult to grow in specific agro-ecological zones is not climate-smart.

Markets in a climate-smart world are likely to be different. Many western diets are poor for human health and the environment. There is increasing recognition that eating habits will need to change. Fat taxes are being introduced. There are campaigns about “carbon footprints”. This trend is likely to intensify. In a climate-smart world, developing countries will need to improve the efficiency of production methods for export products if they are to compete; or may need to shift to alternative products that have less of an environmental impact.

Climate-smart agriculture is likely to be very different in different places. In some regions of the world we have to expect greenhouse gas emissions to increase, given the significant yield gaps that exist. But even here it is not business as usual, as the emissions per unit food produced will likely be lower than under business as usual. In other regions of the world, especially in developed countries, CSA will involve de-intensifying agriculture to reduce the environmental footprint. In some parts of the world, we can expect incremental adaptation as varieties change and as cropping systems are altered. In other parts we can expect transformative adaptation as industries move and transform; as new crops are brought in; as major shifts occur between livestock and crops.

CSA will bring in new policies. This is already the case in some countries. For example, we see “carbon farming initiatives”. NAMAs and NAPAs are widespread and are increasingly giving more attention to agriculture. REDD+ plans are recognising agriculture as a driver of deforestation and we can expect greater attention to the details of how to solve this – involving policies and actions in the forestry and agriculture sectors.

CSA is also about visioning an uncertain future world, and about acting on those visions. While we may know many of the solutions to today's problem’s, we now have to plan for the next decade – with rising temperatures and more extreme events. Seasonal forecasting and long term climate projections are, unfortunately, riddled with uncertainty (though we can expect this situation to improve with further research). Tools are now being put in place that will help development practitioners and service providers to farmers envision a future world. With a click on a site on a map you should be able to get a series of predictions about future climates. With a click on a site you should be able to see places which can be visited to get a glimpse of the likely future climate for your site. Farmer-to-farmer visits can be organised to such analogue places to exchange views on how farming may have to shift.

CSA is also about a new research agenda. There are many new research issues that need urgent attention. We need downscaled climate projections that work for those involved in agriculture. We need much better seasonal forecasting for climate risk management. We need enhanced index-based insurance products. Farmers, extension workers and development planners need the decision support tools to help navigate the trade-offs amongst production goals, adaptation goals and mitigation goals. We need basic information on the costs of different options (to take a case in point, the costs of soil carbon sequestration in Australia range from $10-50/ton CO2. Such lack of precision is having major implications for policy development). And CSA means a new wave of attention to breeding – breeders need to think about what is needed in 10-20 years time, with crop-specific strategies. The implications of climate change on pests and diseases is a major area for research.

CSA is not business as usual. It has many dimensions of additionality. But there are plenty of proven technologies and practices that can be promoted today for a climate-smart world.