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It is predicted that rising temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns will substantially impact food systems. Nutritious crops often require water-intensive growing techniques; hence production decisions and yields could be substantially affected by a changing climate. Value chain interventions can help overcome constraints in terms of inputs, storage and transportation that limit access to nutritious foods which may become more pronounced in the face of climate change. However, interventions should be tailored to specific regions and consider the environmental trade-offs that may be required. Public-private partnerships that strengthen market linkages may allow for access to more nutritious food, but require an understanding of the roles for both public and private actors.

Value chains in agriculture and food production involve large numbers of private-sector participants, from agricultural suppliers and farmers through to food manufacturers and processors, retailers, caterers and insurers. Companies coming together in shared agendas and actions on climate risks may offer a means to accelerate responses in the food system to a changing climate. One major global business partnership is the Climate-Smart Agriculture initiative of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Announced at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, the initiative sets out global targets for private-sector action by 2030 under three pillars of climate-smart agriculture: increasing productivity, strengthening climate change resilience, and mitigating climate change. Demonstrating progress towards these targets will need monitoring and evaluation. Early analysis, ahead of formal WBCSD reporting, highlights the key potentials for—and obstacles to—measuring collective advances towards the global targets. The analysis shows that the global agrifood sector is exceeding WBCSD targets for global food production, but falling short on emissions reductions, and failing to track outcomes for farmers’ livelihoods. Major information gaps include: the nutritional value and accessibility of increased food production; resource-use intensity and the protection of ecosystems; and the resilience and welfare of agricultural communities and landscapes under climate change. Major challenges to effective monitoring, evaluation and reporting include: amplifying complementary actions across value chains; balancing group versus individual accountability; and moving beyond dispersed activities and outcomes to broader system-wide change.

Research-based evidence on the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices is vital to their effective uptake, continued use and wider diffusion. In addition, an enabling policy environment at the national and regional levels is necessary for this evidence to be used effectively. This chapter analyzes a 4-year period of continuous policy engagement in East Africa in an attempt to understand the role of multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) in facilitating an enabling policy environment for climate change adaptation and mitigation. The study shows how MSPs enhanced a sense of ownership, developed knowledge, created linkages between different governance levels and a wide variety of actors (including policymakers and scientists), and, most significantly, improved policy formulation.

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.

Southern Africa has a mono-modal rainfall regime which is largely rain-fed and dominated by smallholder farmers with limited livelihood alternatives. To improve farmers’ resilience to changing weather patterns, climate-smart agriculture (CSA) solutions have been developed. However, despite pockets of success, CSA has not been widely adopted. At the field level, farmers’ uptake of CSA has generally lagged behind scientific advances, with farmers still experiencing poor livelihood outcomes. Drawing lessons from ongoing development projects, we describe the initiation and development of three innovative partnerships to scale up four climate-smart solutions: a bilateral partnership (Zimbabwe), a multilateral partnership (Zambia) and a unipolar partnership (Malawi). The processes and experiences of forming country project teams, models of partnership and methods used to reach farmers are also described in this chapter. The key results are as follows: (i) successful partnerships working to scale up CSA are closely linked to well-defined, mutual benefits for all stakeholders; (ii) to scale up CSA it is essential to build on existing, successful mechanisms; (iii) transparency is needed in the decision-making process among the partners.

There is a large and growing literature on the potential use of rural financial instruments for stimulating the adoption of climate-smart land-use practices and systematically anchoring climate-smart agricultural production processes. Available studies focus on the functional properties of finance for funding short-term input purchases and supporting climate-smart farming systems. We advocate for more integrated approaches that also consider the indirect effects of finance on income and wealth and the derived expenditure effects for the intensification of farming systems. Financial instruments also might contribute to behavioural change and social learning among value-chain partners and thus enable them to invest in long-term solutions for sustainable agriculture. For effectively anchoring climate-smart adaptation processes, this more comprehensive (i.e., integrated and dynamic) approach offers promising perspectives.