Identifying Pathways for Scaling Up Climate-Smart Agriculture

Task Force 6: Accelerating SDGs: Exploring New Pathways to the 2030 Agenda 1. The Challenge Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) was first ideated in 2009 by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Bank, and has since been refined and reshaped with inputs from various stakeholders. [1] The goal of CSA is to provide a new set of principles for the management of agriculture in a changing climate, with its focus on climate mitigation along with adaptation and productivity improvements. [2] CSA could also support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement. [3] The growing focus on CSA is timely. An estimated 22 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 were from the agriculture, forestry, and other land use sectors. [4] Moreover, adverse impacts of climate change on agricultural productivity—including those of increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as floods and droughts—have diminished food and water security, thereby creating a massive challenge to meet the SDGs. [5] A 2022 FAO report emphasises that the quest to end hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition in all its forms is in a downward trend. In 2021, an estimated 2.3 billion people—or 30 percent of the global population—were moderately or severely food insecure. The COVID-19 pandemic caused the situation to further deteriorate, affecting 350 million more people after 2019. [6] This trend underlines the need to focus on all three components of CSA—i.e., productivity, mitigation, and adaptation. In this context, CSA presents an encompassing framework that attempts to improve productivity while addressing mitigation and adaptation in the sector. Despite such ambitions, the current practices of CSA are not without their challenges. A primary challenge is to acknowledge, identify and address the nexus of the three goals that CSA promises to deliver. Critics highlight that this “triple-win” theory is not a given—i.e., it cannot be substantiated that progress in one objective necessarily advances the other two. [7] , [8] Therefore, maximising synergies and minimising trade-offs are critical for its implementation. Advances in CSA need a holistic approach by broadening the scope to include inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary approaches; consider the entire agriculture value chain; and move beyond simple technological/scientific solutions. CSA implementation also requires addressing some common governance challenges like fixing the gap between policy and practice; developing a participatory approach; focusing on small-scale producers, with women as primary targets; understanding and integrating the political economy context in planning and implementation; and finally, measuring progress using pre-defined monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) processes. [9] , [10]