Learning Events
Photo: Neil Palmer, CIAT
The Learning Event is an opportunity to share knowledge on successful, concrete examples of best practice (policy and/or technology) in early action on agricultural adaptation and mitigation that delivers economic and livelihood benefits. The triple wins we need for climate smart agriculture.
You can now view the presentations from each learning event on slideshare or by clicking on the ‘Details…’ link for each learning event
no. 1
room GAfDB | IFAD | ICRAF | UNEP
How is Evergreen Agriculture building resilience and increasing food security within a changing climate?
Evergreen Agriculture combines agroforestry with the principles of conservation farming. The addition of agroforestry offers multiple livelihood benefits to farmers, including sources of green (organic) fertilizer to build healthier soils and enhance crop yields, and providing fruits, medicines, livestock fodder, and fuelwood. Environmental benefits include land rehabilitation, a more effective water cycle and watershed protection, increased biodiversity, increased carbon accumulation and storage and greater resilience to climate change – addressing mitigation and adaptation.
Evergreen Agriculture is now practiced on tens of millions of hectares within SSA including 5 million hectares in Niger alone. In Malawi, maize yields have increased almost three-fold when grown under a canopy of Faidherbia albida trees. Other trees used include Sesbania sesbania, Gliricidia sepium and Tephrosia candida. Along with the increased soil carbon accumulation under conservation farming, trees on farms sequester carbon while providing fruit, fodder and other livelihood benefits. A broad alliance is now emerging among governments, research institutions and development agencies to expand Evergreen Agriculture across hundreds of millions of hectares in Africa and Asia.
no. 2
room ACARE | CCAFS | Ecoagriculture Partners
What role for carbon finance in climate smart small holder agriculture?
In September 2010 CARE, CCAFS and the World Agroforestry Centre, with support from Rockefeller Foundation, initiated a learning program in western Kenya — Sustainable Agriculture in a Changing Climate — focused on the Nyando river catchment. The project explores how carbon finance might support small-holder agriculture in poorer areas of Kenya. Farmers are supported to adopt a range of agroforestry, crop diversification and conservation agriculture interventions that increase farm production, build resilience to climate change, and store carbon. The innovation lies in (1) exploring how to finance the program, including the use of carbon finance; (2) different approaches to benefit-sharing; and (3) different institutional arrangements for program management over the longer term.
Early results indicate barriers to adoption, benefits at farmer level, and the type of incentives or other enabling measures needed to address barriers and maximize benefits. The low financial returns and uncertainties of market-based finance validate concerns about the relevance and viability of an agricultural carbon project approach, suggesting instead an approach centred on more productive and climate resilient agriculture with mitigation as a co-benefit. That said, modeling of potential carbon revenues indicates that, at the land- scape scale, carbon or mitigation finance may still have an important role to play.
no. 3
room BFANRPAN | World Vision
How to build the resilience of African smallholder farmers in a changing climate?
There are few tools that can effectively measure the impact of shocks and stressors on the lives of the poor. Vulnerability assessment is potentially a useful way for identifying, monitoring and evaluating house-hold welfare over time. By intermittently measuring the livelihood assets owned by a household over a period of time, researchers can determine household vulnerability and provide empirical evidence to inform investment decisions around the design of policy responses and programme interventions aimed at strengthening household resilience. FANRPAN developed the Household Vulnerability Index (HVI) to measure the vulnerability of rural households to external shocks such as disease outbreaks, extreme weather and stressors such as food insecurity. The HVI achieves this by quantifying a household’s access to five livelihood capitals (natural, physical, financial, human and social assets) and, by classifying households into low, moderate or high vulnerability.
Following the successful piloting of the HVI tool in three countries in southern Africa (Lesotho, Swaziland and Zimbabwe) in partnership with World Vision International, FANRPAN will share perspectives on the importance of collecting household panel data, developing and updating livelihood databases which are then used to benchmark livelihoods and provide data for modeling projected changes in livelihood as a result of climate change.
no. 4
room COxfam | WFP
How can integrated risk management assist poor, food insecure and vulnerable people adapt and build resilience to climate change?
The question of how to build rural resilience against growing climate-related risk is critical for addressing global poverty. In response to this challenge, the United Nations World Food Programme and Oxfam America have launched the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative. R4 builds on the initial success of a holistic risk management framework developed by Oxfam America to enable poor farmers to strengthen their food and income security through a combination of improved resource management (risk reduction), microcredit (prudent risk taking), insurance (risk transfer), and savings (risk reserves).
The first example of this pioneering approach is the Horn of Africa Risk Transfer for Adaptation (HARITA) project, a joint initiative led by Oxfam America, the Relief Society of Tigray (REST), Swiss Re, and a dozen other public and private partners. HARITA has broken new ground by enabling Ethiopia’s poorest farmers to pay for crop insurance with their own labour. In its first three years of operations in Ethiopia, HARITA has shown promising results for replication, increasing the number of households taking out insurance from 200 in the initial year to over 13,000 in 2011.
no. 5
room DFAO
What tools and policies are required to bring Food security,
adaptation, and mitigation together?The Learning Event will showcase specific practices, policy and financial options which have been proven to ensure CSA adoption in a number of national contexts. Presenters will highlight the requirements, considerations and assessments that needs to be made in developing systems which have multiple long term benefits and which limit tradeoffs. The learning event will in addition review how climate finances (including both market, public, international and domestic financing) have been made accessible to implement CSA and other adaptation and mitigation processes. The need to integrate climate change policy and finance into agricultural investment strategies, national food security plans and institutional development initiatives will also be discussed.
no. 6
room EAGRA
What role can the private sector play in
climate smart smallholder agriculture in Africa?Research products by international and national research systems provide many of the technologies and tools needed for climate smart agriculture to thrive. What often prevents sustainable uptake of these important technologies and management practices, however, is inadequacies along the agricultural product value chain, especially the absence of private sector players in input and output markets who are critical to producing and distributing inputs, buying produce from smallholder farmers and providing technical assistance.
This event will bring practical examples from AGRA supported initiatives that seek to promote private sector involvement in support of climate smart agriculture to facilitate improved input generation and distribution systems, output markets, financing and insurance. These initiatives have been successful in facilitating improved seed, ISFM and market access for smallholder farmers in a manner that not only improves their incomes but helps them to build resilience to climate change.
no. 7
room FCCAA-IDRC | DFID
How can we build the adaptive capacity of vulnerable African farmers by developing response farming practices?
This learning event addresses how Participatory Action Research (PAR) on agricultural adaptation in Africa has led to the development of ‘response farming’. Response farming refers to a flexible system of farming in which key decisions affecting crop water utilization and crop yield are modified each season in response to pre-season and early season predictions of rainfall. Working with the Climate Change Adaptation in Africa (CCAA) program — a research program jointly funded by Canada’s IDRC and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) — partners used PAR to identify a set of practices that would allow vulnerable farmers to engage in this practice, increasing their adaptive capacity. Researchers have identified effective communication, participatory processes, and the integration of local knowledge as important factors in implementing response farming practices.
The event draws on case studies from countries including Benin, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Sudan to illustrate how response farming practices have been developed and implemented, and the impacts that these practices have had. Case studies will demonstrate the importance of involving farmers and local communities in the process of developing response farming techniques in order to ensure a relevance, ownership, and hence uptake. Presenters will also discuss strategies for scaling out response farming strategies in other contexts to facilitate sustainable adaptation in agricultural systems.
no. 8
room ASEI | Sida | SIANI
How can mitigation funding benefit smallholders’ food security and build climate resilience
The Kenya Agricultural Carbon Project (KACP), developed by the Vi Agroforestry programme, receives mitigation funding from the World Bank’s BioCarbon Fund for soil carbon sequestration and above-ground sequestration in trees.
Apart from providing farmers with a small sum of extra cash, the switch to climate-smart agricultural practices has had the additional benefits of increasing crop yields as well as improving farmer’s resilience to climate change. According to a recent World Bank commissioned study, the crop yield increases alone are worth US$ 200-400/ha/year.
In KACP, Vi Agroforestry and the BioCarbon Fund has developed the Sustainable Agricultural Land Management (SALM) methodology. A model approach to measuring soil carbon sequestration is being used, which has been approved by the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) agency. SALM is a public good, free for any organization to use.
However, concerns have been raised, notably by the International Agricultural Trade Policy Institute (IATP), about the adequacy of a carbon market approach to financing a shift to sustainable agriculture. This event will also discuss these concerns.
no. 9
room GCPWF
How can rainwater management help support food production and smallholder farmers’ ability to adapt to climate variability and change?
Rainwater management strategies represent a key climate smart agriculture approach centered on capturing, storing, managing and increasing productivity of water for climate change adaptation. It ensures rehabilitation of landscapes and sustains crop and livestock production during prolonged dry periods, as well as mitigating flood events. This is a smart strategy since it is decentralized, adaptable, inexpensive, relevant to large areas of lands currently being used for rainfed agriculture, and capable of managing under scenarios of increasing or decreasing rainfall.
Climate predictions indicate both increases and decreases in rainfall in various African basins, where 90% of smallholders rely on rainfed agriculture. Although there is a debate on the increase or decrease of rainfall in Africa, there is an agreement among climate scientists that there will be an increase in temperature. Increasing temperature will increase unproductive water loss thereby reduce soil water availability, decrease productivity and aggravate food insecurity. Adapting to these conditions in rainfed systems requires a continuum of interventions to suit a variety of landscapes and climate scenarios.
This session will provide a framework for rainwater management approaches and illustrate how they contribute to climate adaptation, livelihood improvement and sustainable natural resource management. It will examine the mix of technical, institutional and process innovations needed in order for rainwater management to be successfully implemented at scale. This session will explore five climate smart technologies:
- Zai pits for in situ water management
- Groundwater utilization
- Landscape water management In-field rainwater harvesting
- Small reservoirs
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no. 10
room BCafédirect | IFAD
How to get climate-smart smallholder goods to market?
By the late 1990s, the cocoa sector in Sao Tome e Principe was in severe decline. A crash in the price of the commodity crippled the country’s economy, whose exports were 95% dependent on cocoa, and threw one quarter of its farmers into poverty. Thanks to public-private partnerships involving the Government, IFAD and four private sector enterprises including CaféDirect, the country’s cocoa exports have registered a 10-fold increase since 2004, from 50 tonnes before 2004 to 600 tonnes in 2010, and similar trends are expected for coffee and pepper.
Organic agriculture enhances soil structure and soil fertility, reduces erosion and increases the water retention capacity of soils, making them more productive and resilient to weather shocks and climate change. It also increases biodiversity which builds resilience to storms, heat and increased pest and disease pressure. Conservation agriculture practices underpin the organic system, featuring zero-tillage, forest canopy maintenance, and intercropping of food security crops such as sweet potato, cassava and banana. What other climate-smart approaches provide opportunities for smallholders to access national and global food markets? And does the concept of climate-smart smallholder products provide a useful way of framing market opportunities for the rural poor?
no. 11
room CCNEDD | INRAN
How the Niger Republic is building resilience of farmers to climate change and increasing food security?
In Niger, the climate is characterized as dry- tropical with rainfall becoming more erratic. Soil fertility is also depleting and crop yields are low as much as below 400kg/ha. The groundwater table was dropped about 1m/ year. This situation has made food security a serious challenge. While the environment is harsh, farmers are developing new agroforestry systems. The system is based on experimentation and development of organizational approaches which create new groups and associations of farmers. The objective is to build resilient and productive livelihoods through Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration.
More than 5million hectares have been re-greened, 200 million new trees have been planted, and extra 500,000 ton of cereal have been produced each year, and 1.25 million farm households have been involved. Many regenerated species provide edible leaves and fruits for humans. Increasingly, value added products are bringing in additional income. This is an example of low cost agricultural intensification that has benefitted farmers, and helped them adapt to climate change by building more drought resilient farming systems. Because of its low cost, ease of adoption, rapid results and multiple benefits, applicability of FMNR should be promoted in as many regions as is practicable.
no. 12
room DLandbrug Fødevarer
How Denmark is mitigating green house gases and increasing production in the agriculture sector?
Agriculture has an important role to play in mitigating GHG emission. Increased resource efficiency, targeted non-food biomass production, and changed agricultural practices are key to climate-smart agriculture in Denmark. Danish agriculture is a good example of climate-smart agriculture, as Danish farmers are producing food, energy and ecosystem services, with positive effects on the environment and green house gas emissions.
Concrete actions have been taken, e.g. a ban on burning of straw on the fields, action plans for the aquatic environment, ammonia action plan, action plan for joint biogas plants, environmental approval act for livestock holdings, new energy policy agreement, agreement on Green Growth 2009 — which include reduction of the agriculture sectors emissions of greenhouse gasses. Further to this, the Danish Government has a goal to reduce overall green house gas emission by 40% by 2020.
no. 13
room EAFPAT | CTA | IPACC
How can pastoralist traditional knowledge be combined with atmospheric science and contribute to adaptation policy making?
This event focuses on the lessons and result of a process lasting several months with representatives from pastoralist communities, atmospheric scientists and policy makers. This started at a Climate Change Conference in Bonn in June, ended in a workshop organized by IPACC, AFPAT and the Chadian Ministry of Water in N’Djamena in November. This workshop was attended by two Chadian ministers, representatives from pastoralist communities from different countries meeting with scientists from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), the national meteorological services, National Centre for Support to Research (CNAR) and representatives from international development organizations including CTA, UNESCO, UNDP and GEF-SGP produced a declaration for COP17.
The N’Djamena Declaration highlights the relevance of traditional and scientific knowledge systems, their potential synergies and the establishment of enabling climate adaptation policies and processes. Both systems of knowledge, and their synergistic interactions, can facilitate their complementary application and ensure effective communication between scientists, pastoralists and policy makers. It further recognises the need for considering pastoralism as an important economic activity in the African continent.
Events Session 1:
Successes in Agricultural Adaptation and Mitigation
11.10 – 12.10 Choice of one of seven Learning Events
Events Session 2:
Successes in Agricultural Adaptation and Mitigation
12.20 – 13.20 Choice of one of six Learning Events
