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Bringing the Concept of Climate-Smart Agriculture to Life: Insights from CSA Country Profiles across Africa, Asia, and Latin America The Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) Country Profile Series assesses climate change challenges and solutions in the agricultural sectors of more than 30 countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). This report introduces the first analysis of a new dataset drawn from these profiles, aggregating bottom-up results from individual expert assessments of CSA technologies. It offers the most complete overview to date of technologies considered climate-smart around the world. The emerging insights shed light on technologies in different locations and farming systems, their strengths and weaknesses across different dimensions of climate-smartness, and their specific barriers to adoption. As a result, a more concrete and specific picture of CSA emerges that could help demystify the concept, reveal synergies between the three CSA pillars (productivity, adaptation, and mitigation), and allow for more targeted technology deployment and scale-up.

Governments, donors, and non-governmental organizations are recognizing the need to integrate climate change and agriculture development goals in planning. Incorporating the climate-smart agriculture (CSA) concept can strengthen integration by explicitly emphasizing tradeoffs between investment options. Given the complex relationships between the food security, adaption, and mitigation goals of CSA, decision-support frameworks are needed that integrate stakeholder priorities, draw on the best scientific evidence available, and present complex results simply. Here we present a four phase stakeholder-driven framework for prioritizing CSA investment, designed to be globally applicable, for various users, for use from regional to sub-national levels, and adjustable given data and resource constraints. In the first phase, the scope and next-users of CSA portfolios are clarified, relevant practices are identified, and roughly ten indicators are selected/adapted from a suggested set of 29, based on scientific literature, to evaluate practices against CSA outcomes. A participatory workshop is used in phase 2 to short-list practices based on the results of the indicator evaluation and additional stakeholder criteria. A cost-benefit analysis is then conducted (phase 3) on these priority practices. In phase 4, stakeholders are reconvened to develop CSA investment portfolios that minimize trade-offs, maximize benefits and synergies, and address end user priorities. Barriers to adoption of practices and pathways to overcome these are used to adjust priorities or implementation plans. We present lessons learned from Guatemala and Mali, which demonstrate the scalability of the process, modifications based on institutional contexts, and strategies for refining the framework for use in Africa and Asia in 2015 with users including national agriculture ministries, agriculture development alliances, and bilateral and multilateral donors.

Unprecedented impacts of climate change on agricultural systems around the world coupled with increasing food demand underlie the urgency of building a more productive, resilient, and low-emission agricultural development model - one that is climate-smart. Establishing climate-smart agriculture (CSA) systems requires investment in concrete on-farm practices and broader programs to establish implementation at scales that will transform systems to address food security and development goals in the face of climate change. The CSA Prioritization Framework (CSA-PF) was designed by scientists at CIAT and CCFAS to guide actors at multiple levels in their effort to identify best-bet CSA investment portfolios through scientific and participatory evaluation of the broad set of applicable practices for a given context. The CSA-PF is a CSA implementation planning and policy support tool aimed at governments, donors, non-governmental organizations, and local actors. The framework explicitly targets investments that diminish trade-offs between productivity increases, gains in adaptive capacity, and lowering emissions contributions from agriculture. Given the various needs of potential users and investment targets, the CS-PF can be adapted to stakeholders' needs and resources. It has been designed as a four phase process, but current pilots has varied this approach, adding additional analyses and decision taking points as needed. The first phase leads the main user of the prioritization process, in collaboration with a team of experts, to identify the objectives, scope of the study based on vulnerable areas and production systems key for food security, and the associated climatic and non-climatic challenges to be addressed through CSA interventions. The process then continues with the development of a long list of CSA practices applicable to the selected region(s) and production systems, and the identification of indicators to assess the practice's impacts on productivity, adaptation and mitigation. In Phase 2, stakeholders validate these results through participatory workshops and select a shorter list of CSA practices for further investigation based on the analyses from the first phase. An economic analysis, most often a cost-benefit analysis, is conducted in Phase 3 for the short-listed practices. A second workshop for data validation is held in Phase 4, where stakeholders discuss strategies to minimize trade-offs, to increase synergies between practices, and to minimize barriers to adoptions. The process results in the collaborative development of CSA investment portfolios. Through a comparative case study approach, this paper also illustrates the results from implementing the CSA-PF in Colombia, Guatemala, and Mali, where the prioritization objectives vary from strengthening current national agricultural and climate change policy (Guatemala), to articulating governmental and non-governmental actors around CSA actions (Mali), to scaling out CSA initiatives with local community groups (Colombia). Opportunities and challenges related to the different approaches to using the framework are discussed and recommendations for down-scaling the CSA-PF and establishing multi-level planning platforms are formulated, thus contributing to the wider goal of informing agriculture and climate change policy and decision-making. (Texte intégral)

Supporting the diversification of African agricultural systems by the further integration of nutritious, perennial ‘new and orphan crops’ (NOC) is seen as an important means to address malnutrition in Africa. The approach may be of particular relevance in the context of climate change, with the diversification of food systems possibly supporting more resilient food provision in the face of more variable weather patterns. Here, we relate how perennial NOC can support dietary diversity at a subnational level within a seasonal context based on crop portfolios. We also explore the resilience of the production of perennial crops, based on year-on-year crop yield data for eastern and southern African countries provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database (FAOSTAT). These analyses support the role of perennial NOC in creating resilient food systems and indicate a potential for compensatory annual–perennial crop combinations, although further research is needed on this point. Making use of FAOSTAT country-level trend data, we also relate constraints and potential opportunities for perennial food crop production. We then explain how NOC are currently being promoted in the region, with specific reference to the work of the African Orphan Crops Consortium and its breeder-training programme. We discuss the challenges faced in delivering perennial NOC planting material to farmers, which are exacerbated by climate change, and the measures that are being taken to overhaul delivery systems.