Curated Content

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.

Site-Specific Nutrient Management (SSNM) provides guidance relevantto the context of farmers’ fields.SSNM maintains or enhances crop yields, while providing savings for farmers through more efficient fertilizer use. By minimizing fertilizer overuse, greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced, in some cases up to 50%.

Integrated Soil Fertility Management (ISFM) is a set of practices related to cropping, fertilizers, organic resources and other amendments on smallholder farms to increase production and input use efficiency. ISFM delivers productivity gains, increased resilience, and mitigation benefits. ISFM benefits food security and incomes enhances yield stability in rainfed systems, and reduces greenhouse gas emissions from soils and fertilizers making it of value to climate-smart agriculture.

Taking a gender-responsive approach to Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) means that the particular needs, priorities, and realities of men and women are recognized and adequately addressed in the design and application of CSA so that both men and women can equally benefit.

The Climate-Smart Agriculture Rapid Appraisal (CSA- RA) provides an assessment of key barriers to and opportunities for CSA adoption across landscapes by collecting gender-disaggregated data, perceptions of climate variability, and resource and labor allocation,
as well as economic assessments at the household level. This approach combines participatory workshops, expert interviews, household/farmer interviews, and farm transect walks to gather and capture the realities and challenges facing diverse farming communities.

 ‘Climate-smart agriculture’ (CSA)—agriculture and food systems that sustainably increase food production, improve resilience (or adaptive capacity) of farming systems, and mitigate climate change when possible—has quickly been integrated into the global development agenda. However, the empirical evidence base for CSA has not been assembled, complicating the transition from CSA concept to concrete actions, and contributing to ideological disagreement among development practitioners. Thus, there is an urgent need to evaluate current knowledge on the effectiveness of CSA to achieve its intended benefits and inform discourse on food, agriculture, and climate change. This systematic review intends to establish the scientific evidence base of CSA practices to inform the next steps in development of agricultural programming and policy.

This information note discusses the findings from CCAFS submisssion to the UNFCCC SBSTA on Impact of climate change on African agriculture: focus on pests and diseases.

To ensure a food-secure future, farming must become climate resilient. Around the world, governments and communities are adopting innovations that are improving the lives of millions while reducing agriculture’s climate footprint. These successful examples show the many ways climate-smart agriculture can take shape, and should serve as inspiration for future policies and investments.

This booklet provides examples of climate-smart systems by showcasing some FAO success stories in various countries. The cases have been selected from the FAO Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) Sourcebooklaunched in 2013 to show the diversity of poten al op ons across different regions and agricultural systemsalso covering subjects such as biodiversity and gender.

The pilot projects of the Mitigation of Climate Change in Agriculture (MICCA) Programme of FAO in Kenya and the United Republic of Tanzania have promoted climate-smart agriculture (CSA) and have been integrated into ongoing development programmes. The objective of the pilot projects was to show that smallholder farmers can improve their livelihoods and increase their productivity and contribute to climate change mitigation at the same time. The approach was to develop packages of climate-smart agricultural practices based on participatory assessments and expert consultations, implement the selected practices using a variety of extension methods and evaluate their effects on yield, food security and their potential to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions on farms and throughout the landscape. Farmers who participated in the MICCA pilot projects reported that the main bene ts of CSA were higher yields, greater farm income and increased food availability. This is an indication that smallholder farmers can be an effective part of the response to climate change and make a meaningful contribution to reducing GHG emissions. Bringing sound, up-to-date evidence into decision-making processes can help shape policies that support CSA.