Viable Climate Smart Agriculture in South Asia - SAR-CLIMATE

The Economic Viability of Climate-Smart Agriculture

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James Giles (Photo by ADPC)

James Giles is a Climate Strategy Specialist with the Alliance of Bioversity International & International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT)

Do you believe that Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) is part of the solution that the international community is searching for?

I am always cautious to speak about CSA as a solution, when you consider the extent of the challenges it is trying to address, including; building resilience to climate change amongst some of the world’s most vulnerable communities; supporting sustainable agricultural development, including for smallholder farmers who have often been left behind, benefiting very little from the strides made in global development in recent decades; ensuring food and nutritional security for a growing population; and reducing the contribution of the agricultures sector to global GHG emissions.

So, while CSA may not be a solution to these problems, I do believe it is one of the most effective tools we have at our disposal to try and address their compounding challenges.

From my experience, the strength of CSA lies in its breadth and flexibility. When most people hear the word CSA, they think of on-farm practices, when in fact, the concept is much broader, including a focus on developing the technical, policy, and investment conditions necessary for the sustainable development of the agriculture sector under climate change.

The flexibility of the concept allows it to be widely adjusted to different global contexts, ensuring it remains relevant and does not intend to impose measures from other countries and regions.

Finally, CSA encompasses a number of different concepts that remain important in their own right, but can equally fit under the CSA umbrella.

So yes, CSA is part of the solution, but so is value chain development, biodiversity conservation, the empowerment of women and girls, increased mechanization, access to finance, and many more areas that can both stand on their own or can be considered components of CSA.

What are the entry points for initiating CSA practices? Where do we begin?

I believe this question on entry points is extremely important when talking about CSA in South Asia, because we’ve seen through our work that while many of the practices and technologies we’re promoting as climate-smart have been around for a long time, the adoption rate remains very low.

The reason that we see such low levels of adoption is that there are a number of barriers that act not only to frustrate the adoption of CSA but to constrain the development of the agriculture sector as a whole.

Therefore, by focusing on entry points, we’re looking to make interventions at the source of the problem, gradually removing these barriers till the correct conditions are in place for the adoption of CSA.

These entry points may be filling existing knowledge gaps, improving technical capacity, market access, access to credit, or influencing policy design.

In order to achieve impact in the areas where we’re working, we try to identify partner organizations who are implementing programming on the ground, then we work with them to understand their needs and constraints, conducting research that generates an evidence base to support their activities.

To do this, we must understand the priorities of the different actors and align our research outputs to their needs. This is where we see different entry points emerge depending on the types of interventions we’re proposing and the different end uses. For example, a key entry point for national or provincial policymakers, is quantifying how the interventions can support the attainment of policy objectives, whether they’re focused on climate change adaptation, rural development, food security, or climate change mitigation through the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

These recommendations need to be targeted towards ministries and departments mandated for their implementation and include clear and costed implementation plans.

If we identify a role for international organizations to support a project, we should quantify how the recommendations we make align with their programmatic priorities and at a scale that is appropriate for their program.

Therefore, the tools we find ourselves using to provide the evidence base include field and landscape-level cost-benefit analysis, greenhouse gas mitigation assessments, environmental impact assessments, and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting to attract sustainable finance.

While many of the practices and technologies we’re promoting as climate-smart have been around for a long time, the adoption rate remains very low.

Is the region heading in the right direction to implement CSA policies?

In short, yes. For example, CSA is already explicitly mentioned in Nepal’s 2016 Agriculture Development Strategy which highlights the need to improve the capacity of extension staff and farmers on CSA.

In Pakistan, the 2018 Agriculture and Food Security Policy highlights the role of CSA in adapting agricultural production to a changing climate, with CSA also highlighted in provincial policies for Punjab, Balochistan, and Sindh.

While Bangladesh’s 2018 National Agriculture Policy doesn’t mention CSA by name, the policy does refer to many of the key components of CSA, and CSA practices and interventions can also be located in other national climate change policies, development plans, and their NDC.

However, despite the inclusion in policy both at the national and subnational level, there remains quite a large implementation gap with many of the recommendations not being executed on the ground due to insufficient budget allocation.

For example, recent research we did in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan showed that while the agriculture sector contributed to 14% of the provincial economy, the Agriculture Department received only 3.8% of the provincial budget – constraining its ability to meet the objectives set out in the policy.

From my discussions with policymakers, one of the challenges they identified in addressing the implementation gaps for CSA is that they lack information on what needs to be done to implement these practices at scale.

This is where we see a role for international organizations in supporting policy makers to develop action plans that include components that are critical for successful implementation at local levels.

In addition to this, many of the existing policies focus on on-farm CSA practices but fail to include measures nurture the enabling environment for their adoption, such as access to climate information services, markets, and credit.

So, for policies to effectively facilitate the widespread adoption of CSA, we need to work to actively address these challenges.

James Giles spoke with ADPC as part of its ‘Climate Talks’ panel discussion on Climate-Smart Agriculture in South Asia

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homolata

homolata.borah@adpc.net

http://www.adpc.net

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