In the arid areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, perennial challenges of water scarcity and food insecurity are exacerbated by climate change and variability. The development of robust strategies to cope with the region’s climatic challenges requires thorough consideration of uncertainty and risk in decision making. We demonstrate the use of probabilistic decision analysis to compare intervention options to prevent reservoir sedimentation in Burkina Faso. To illustrate this approach, we developed a causal impact pathway model based on the local knowledge of expert stakeholders. Input parameters were described by probability distributions derived from estimated confidence intervals. The model was run in a Monte Carlo simulation to generate the range of plausible decision outcomes, quantified as the net present value and the annual cash flow. We used Partial Least Squares regression analysis to identify the parameters that most affected projected intervention outcomes and we computed the Expected Value of Perfect Information (EVPI) to highlight critical uncertainties. Numerical results show that the preferred intervention to secure agricultural production is a combination of dredging, rock dams and a buffer scheme around the reservoir. The EVPI calculation reveals an information value for the profit per ton of vegetables, indicating that more information on this variable would be useful for supporting the decision. However, without the need for follow-up analysis, the results show high probability of benefits given the combined interventions, which, given the current state of information, should be preferred over inaction.
Tag: agriculture
The Climate-Smart Agriculture Papers
This volume shares new data relating to Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA), with emphasis on experiences in Eastern and Southern Africa. The book is a collection of research by authors from over 30 institutions, spanning the public and private sectors, with specific knowledge on agricultural development in the region discussed. The material is assembled to answer key questions on the following five topic areas: (1) Climate impacts: What are the most significant current and near future climate risks undermining smallholder livelihoods? (2) Varieties: How can climate-smart varieties be delivered quickly and cost-effectively to smallholders? (3) Farm management: What are key lessons on the contributions from soil and water management to climate risk reduction and how should interventions be prioritized? (4) Value chains: How can climate risks to supply and value chains be reduced? and (5) Scaling up: How can most promising climate risks reduction strategies be quickly scaled up and what are critical success factors? Readers who will be interested in this book include students, policy makers, and researchers studying climate change impacts on agriculture and agricultural sustainability.
Climate-Smart Agriculture: Enhancing Resilient Agricultural Systems, Landscapes, and Livelihoods in Ethiopia and Beyond
In Sub-Saharan Africa, the majority of the population depends on subsistence farming in a system characterized by high forest landscape degradation, low soil fertility, erratic rainfall, small farm sizes, and a high population. Over 936.1 million people live in this region, and over 60% of the population depends on farming, according to 2015 data from the World Bank. To meet the increasing food demand (both in quantity and quality) of the increasing population, the agricultural practices in the region have been expanding to forests and biodiversity hotspot areas. At the same time, climate change is posing severe challenges resulting in low agricultural production and low resilience capacities of smallholder communities in this region. To address the challenges, evidence-based and eco-friendly technologies and approaches are crucial for improving food security and livelihoods in the region. Enhancing the production of food on less land in more sustainable ways will improve the capacities of smallholder communities to cope with climate shocks and improve the resiliency of communities and ecosystems. Integrated and climate-smart approaches, for example, on land, water and forest management practices can sustainably increase agricultural productivity, and ecosystem and societal resilience while reducing greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions for enhancing to achieve national, regional, and global developments including food security and livelihoods improvement.With the aim of compiling climate-smart technologies and practices which combine both food security and climate change issues, the World Agroforestry (ICRAF) in Ethiopia took an initiative to prepare a book with information organized based on scientific knowledge and case studies gathered from different parts of Ethiopia and other Sub-Saharan Africa countries. To this end, ICRAF invited professionals from several institutions and organizations to document and exchange all available evidence based knowledge and local agro-ecological practices with contributions from a range of topics including agriculture, water management, agroforests, soil, ecosystems, climate change, rural energy, socioeconomic, gender and policy issues in Sub-Saharan Africa, with emphasis on Ethiopia.The book presents evidence-based knowledge and scalable practices which can be tailored to different biophysical, socioeconomic, policy, and institutional contexts. The technologies and practices described in this book include promising options by considering varying contexts and demands, which can potentially enhance accelerated restoration of degraded landscapes, sustainable agricultural production and foodnutrition-energy security while contributing to resilient ecosystems and societies to climate change. The book also provides frameworks and strategies, which improve informed decision-making and facilitate accelerated adoption and scaling up of the technologies and practices in Ethiopia and the SSA. The book highlights approaches, which are timely and critical towards achieving national and regional development strategies in SSA, while contributing to global initiatives, such as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and Forest Landscape Restoration. The important information of the book can be used by different users, such as researchers, extension staff, local communities, practitioners, academics, and policy makers.
The State of the World’s Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture
The report complements other global assessments prepared under the auspices of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, which have focused on the state of genetic resources within particular sectors of food and agriculture.
Agroforestry for sustainable agriculture
Agroforestry seeks to balance protection of forest resources, the exploitation of the ecosystem services that trees can contribute to agriculture and the role of agroforestry in diversifying the range of agricultural products and markets. This volume reviews the latest research on the role and implementation of main types of agroforestry, understanding and assessing the ecosystem services that agroforestry can deliver and techniques for optimising agroforestry practice. The book’s main focus is on temperate agroforestry, but also reviews particular issues facing agroforestry in the tropics. The collection will be a standard reference for forestry and agricultural scientists in universities, government and other research centres in agroforestry
Climate-Smart Agriculture for Ethiopia and Beyond
Smallholder farming systems in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have been characterized by low crop yields as well as their reliance on ecosystem services. With chronically stagnant productivity, accommodating the growing demand for food, fuel, and income sources for a population that has doubled in the last decades has mainly been accomplished by the expansion of agricultural land (through clearing forestland) and/or by increasing cropping intensity through reduced fallows and mining of soil nutrients. Consequently, soil degradation has increasingly threatened the resilience of the ecosystems on which African smallholder agricultural systems have critically depended for their food security. African smallholder systems, which have already been stressed by unsustainable use of natural resources, are further threatened by climate change. The climate-smart agriculture (CSA) approaches advocate for the use of locally evolved and/or improved technologies, practices, and policies that can result in increased yield per unit area, as well as sustainable environment; combined, these approaches can meet the needs of growing populations while also maintaining resilient ecosystems. There is a broad range of diverse, climate-smart interventions, yet their individual efficacies may de-pend on how well they align with locally specific livelihood needs and contexts. The primary objective of this book is to provide guidance for academic, research, outreach, policy and development stakehold-ers to select specific (if possible) evidence-based CSA technologies, practices, and policies, or a mix thereof, to improve smallholder food production and sustain ecosystem services in Ethiopia and SSA countries. This chapter specifically elaborates on the rationales for why CSA approaches are needed, in the context of Ethiopia and SSA countries, to not only improve agricultural productivity and advance climate adaptation and mitigation goals, but also to simultaneously identify and address root causes of low soil fertility, high rates of soil erosion on farmlands, overall landscape degradation, and low and stagnant agricultural productivity, which often result in household food insecurity and poverty.
An Introduction to the Climate-Smart Agriculture Papers
Over the last decade, international concerns about climate change have stimulated broad investment in the pursuit of agriculture that is more climate-smart. These concerns are particularly pressing in Africa, where most farmers remain severely impoverished and dependent on rain-fed production systems. This volume collates some of the latest research from agricultural scientists working to speed up the development and adoption of more climate-smart farming systems in eastern and southern Africa. These 25 papers highlight ongoing efforts to better characterise climate risks, develop and disseminate climate-smart varieties and farm management practices, and integrate these technologies into well-functioning value chains. The papers emphasise the additional research efforts needed to improve the understanding and response to climate risk. The expert authors also make suggestions for strengthening the responsiveness of agricultural research and extension systems to future climate changes.
Farmer-To-Farmer Extension: A Low-Cost Approach for Promoting Climate-Smart Agriculture
Many farmers across the tropics are unable to access information on climate-smart agriculture (CSA). This chapter assesses the potential of farmer-to-farmer extension (F2FE) as a low-cost approach for promoting CSA. It is based on surveys of extension program managers and farmer-trainers in Cameroon, Kenya and Malawi who are involved in promoting a wide range of agricultural practices, including CSA. In the F2FE approach, extension programs provide education for farmer-trainers, who in turn educate other farmers, typically 17–37 per year. Extension program managers find this approach to be effective in boosting their ability to reach large numbers of farmers. Compared to extension programs that provide direct training to groups of farmers, F2FE reduces the cost per farmer trained by over half. There are also important gender benefits, especially when extension programs making special efforts to recruit female farmer-trainers. Many questions still remain, however, about F2FE’s suitability for promoting CSA. F2FE is less appropriate for complex and high-risk technologies, including certain CSA practices, and it can be difficult in areas of low population density. More research is needed comparing whether F2FE or a more conventional extension approach is better equipped to cope with changing weather and increased weather risks. Long-term randomized controlled trials could be used to answer these questions, though such studies require considerable time and expense. Certain proxy questions to assess the relevance of F2FE to CSA could be answered more easily, such as whether farmers prefer to discuss farming risks with farmer-trainers rather than with extension agents.
The Role of Farmers’ Entrepreneurial Orientation on Agricultural Innovations in Ugandan Multi-Stakeholder Platform
This chapter aims to shed light on the broad debate surrounding when and why farmers adopt agricultural innovations, especially in the context of multi-stakeholder platforms (MSP) seeking to scale climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices. No research has yet tested the hypothesis that farmer entrepreneurship—defined as the innovative use of agricultural resources to create opportunities for value creation—may facilitate the adoption of CSA practices. This study is intended to fill that information gap. Farmers involved in coffee and honey MSPs in the Manafwa region of Uganda filled out questionnaires that evaluated four types of entrepreneurial competences: innovativeness, risk-taking, proactiveness and intentions. The goal was to investigate quantitatively the influence of farmer entrepreneurship and farm characteristics on product innovation, process innovation and market innovation. Results confirmed earlier research showing that farmer educational levels have a stronger influence on process innovation than any other variable. In addition, it was shown that farm size and access to resources have a significant effect on all forms of agricultural innovation. The study also found that farm size influences entrepreneurial innovativeness in a surprising way, with smaller farms more likely than larger farms to engage in all forms of innovation. Finally, our study reveals that at least two dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation—proactiveness and innovativeness—may play a role in the adoption of agricultural innovations. These qualities, moreover, can be learned. MSPs seeking to promote innovation, including adoption of CSA practices, might consider investing in programs that help farmers develop entrepreneurial mindsets.
Editorial for the Thematic Series in Agriculture & Food Security: Climate-Smart Agriculture Technologies in West Africa: learning from the ground AR4D experiences
This Thematic Series on “Climate-Smart Agriculture Technologies in West Africa: learning from the ground AR4D experiences” contains seven papers presented by researchers from four West African countries based on participatory action research conducted since 2012 in the region. These research activities were funded by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) through a project titled “Developing community-based climate-smart agriculture through participatory action research in CCAFS benchmark sites in West Africa” (see [1]). This research action under the scientific lead of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) aimed to test and validate, in partnership with rural communities and other stakeholders, scalable climate-smart village models for agricultural development that integrate a range of innovative agricultural risk management strategies. The project also aimed to enable farmers, developers, managers and policy makers for the agriculture sector to develop cost-effective climate-smart agriculture (CSA) options that support local sustainable development and enhance livelihood resilience. It is therefore a response to the challenges (degraded lands, low crop productivity, high level of poverty for rural people, etc.) faced to satisfy the food needs of an increasing population in the face of a changing climate.