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The climate-smart agriculture (CSA) concept is gaining considerable traction at international and national levels to meet the challenges of addressing agricultural planning under climate change. CSA is a concept that calls for integration of the need for adaptation and the possibility of mitigation in agricultural growth strategies to support food security. Several countries around the world have expressed intent to adopt CSA approach to managing their agricultural sectors. However there is considerable confusion about what the CSA concept and approach actually involve, and wide variation in how the term is used. It is critical to build a more formal basis for the CSA concept and methodology and at the same time providing illustrations of how the concept can be applied across a range of conditions. This book expand and formalize the conceptual foundations of CSA drawing upon theory and concepts from agricultural development, institutional and resource economics. The book is also devoted to a set of country level case studies illustrating the economic basis of CSA in terms of reducing vulnerability, increasing adaptive capacity and ex-post risk coping. It also addresses policy issues related to climate change focusing on the implications of the empirical findings for devising effective strategies and policies to support resilience and the implications for agriculture and climate change policy at national, regional and international levels. The book provide development agencies and practitioners, policymakers, civil society, research and academia as well as private sector with tested good practices and innovative approaches of promoting CSA system at country level.

Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) is an approach to guide the management of agriculture in the era of climate change. The concept was first launched in 2009, and since then has been reshaped through inputs and interactions of multiple stakeholders involved in developing and implementing the concept. CSA aims to provide globally applicable principles on managing agriculture for food security under climate change that could provide a basis for policy support and recommendations by multilateral organizations, such as UN’s FAO. The major features of the CSA approach were developed in response to limitations in the international climate policy arena in the understanding of agriculture’s role in food security and its potential for capturing synergies between adaptation and mitigation. Recent controversies which have arisen over CSA are rooted in longstanding debates in both the climate and sustainable agricultural development policy spheres. These include the role of developing countries, and specifically their agricultural sectors, in reducing global GHG emissions, as well as the choice of technologies which may best promote sustainable forms of agriculture. Since the term ʻCSA’ was widely adopted before the development of a formal conceptual frame and tools to implement the approach, there has been considerable variation in meanings applied to the term, which also contributed to controversies. As the body of work on the concept, methods, tools and applications of the CSA approach expands, it is becoming clearer what it can offer. Ultimately, CSA’s utility will be judeged by its effectiveness in integrating climate change response into sustainable agricultural development strategies on the ground.

Climate change, especially through greater frequency and intensity of climate extremes, is expected to negatively impact agriculture and food security, particularly in developing countries highly dependent on rain-fed agriculture. Promoting growth and food security must draw on the rich literature of the past 50–60 years while also addressing potential structural shifts in the factors that promote growth. This paper summarizes the economic considerations of Climate Smart Agriculture, a concept developed by the FAO to address the complex issue of how to achieve sustainable agricultural growth for food security under climate change. It addresses the lack of coherence on the CSA approach by building a formal basis of the CSA concept and methodology. We do this by posing a dynamic optimization problem wherein a social planner seeks to maximize expected discounted welfare associated with agriculture of the population they serve, both now and in the future. We analyze constraints, choices, and features of design of CSA to illustrate on the concept can be applied across a range of locations and conditions. This has implications for research, innovation, and policy design.

Climate change impacts on agriculture are varied over space and time. The effects are heterogeneous and highly uncertain. Innovation in agriculture is clearly an important response for effective and equitable adaptation and mitigation – and we need to rethink how to promote innovation to address the heterogeneity and uncertainty of climate change impacts. In moving towards climate smart agricultural (CSA) systems in developing and developed countries, innovation will be key. For CSA we will need greater resilience in agricultural systems and also greater efficiency of resource use for both adaptation and mitigation. Technological innovation will need to play a key role – but its not enough. Managerial and institutional innovations are likely to be even more important in dealing with the heterogeneous and uncertain impacts of climate change. Innovation can complement other forms of adaptation to climate change to form CSA practices. In particular innovation can enhance technology adoption, may prevent or facilitate migration of production/population, enhance trade & aid, and increase efficiency of insurance & feasibility of inventories. We discuss their main features and the nature of innovation needed to align these actions with a CSA strategy.

Satellite derived measurements are essential inputs to monitor water management and agricultural production for improving regional food security. Near real-time satellites observations can be used to mitigate the adverse impacts of extreme events and promote climate resilience. Population growth and demand of resources in developing countries will increase vulnerability in agriculture production and are likely to be exacerbated by the effects of climate change. This paper introduces wetness and temperature products as important factors in decision and policy making, especially in regions with sparse surface observations. These objective satellite data serve as: (1) an early detector of growing conditions and thus food supply; (2) an index for insurance programs (i.e. risk management) that can more quickly trigger release of catastrophic bonds to farmers to mitigate crop failure impact; (3) an important educational and informational tool in crop selection, resource management, and other adaptation or mitigation strategies; (4) an important tool in food aid and transport; (5) and management of water resource allocation. The two new indices (surface wetness and temperature) are meant to complement currently available datasets, such as the greenness index, soil moisture measurements, and river guages.

As part of the Regional Rice Initiative Pilot Project, UNFAO has committed resources to support policy dialog and decision capacity related to climate change adaptation and mitigation in agriculture, with particular attention to food security and the rice sector in Asia and the Pacific. This initiative includes sponsorship of research to deliver information and knowledge products for policy makers to better manage climate risks to the rice sector and identify adaptation needs for the rice sector in Lao PDR. In the following pages, we report on progress of one component of this activity, econometric estimation of long term impacts that climate change can be expected to have on rice yields. The work reported here is preliminary and should not in its current form be used as a basis for policy.

The perceptions of climate change and adaptation choices made by farmers are important considerations in the design of adaptation strategies by policy makers and agricultural extension services. This paper seeks to determine these perceptions and choices by farmers in already poor environmental regions of Thailand and Vietnam especially vulnerable to climate change. Overall findings were that farmers do perceive climate change, but describe it in quite distinct ways and that location influences how farmers recognize climate change. Our 2007 and 2013 surveys show that farmers are adapting, but it is difficult to determine if specific practices are “climate smart”. Further, adaptation measures are informed by perception and, at least in the case of Vietnam, perceptions are shaped by the respondent’s characteristics, location variables and recent climate related shocks. Finally, the three climate variables of rainfall, temperature, and wind are the most important factors in explaining specific adaptation measures chosen by farmers. Farmer participation is an essential part of public actions designed to allow adaptation to climate change. Our research can also contribute to understanding farmer constraints and tailoring good overall strategies to the local heterogeneity of vulnerable locations.

Over the past several decades, maize yields in the US Midwest have risen at about 17% per decade as a result of steady technological progress. Although the trend is expected to remain positive, climate change is expected to have an increasing countervailing effect. In this chapter, I compute the yield growth rates necessary to fully offset the potential negative effects of a warming climate. Relying on a statistical model allowing for nonlinear effects of temperature on yield, I find that maize yields would decrease by −4.2, −21.8 and −46.1% the trend, under uniform warming scenarios of 1 °C, 3 °C and 5 °C, respectively. I find that an increase of 6.6%/decade in maize yields is required to fully offset the detrimental effects of a severe but still plausible 3 °C warming in the next three decades. This indicates that future maize yield trends could – all else equal – be substantially curtailed due to the climate change. This case study illustrates how agricultural policy analysts can assess the magnitude of potential climate change impacts relative to historical yield trends to help identify targets for agricultural research.

Climate change and enhanced climate variability will have differing impacts on agricultural producers worldwide. The increasing utilization of precision farming and mobile technologies, together with improvements in data management software, offer expanding opportunities for an integrated data platform that links farm-level management decisions and corresponding behavioral changes to site-specific biophysical data and analytical tools. The goals of this paper are to illustrate how decision support tools can be designed to address the farm-scale economic and environmental tradeoffs associated with changes in climatic conditions and how these farm-scale tools could be linked with regional based analyses to scale up to the information needed for better science-based policy.

Can insurance cost-effectively mitigate the increasingly deleterious impacts of climate risk on poverty and food insecurity? The theory reviewed in this chapter suggests an affirmative answer if well-designed insurance contracts can be implemented and priced at a reasonable level despite the uncertainties that attend climate change. Evidence from the IBLI index insurance project in the pastoral regions in East Africa suggest that these practical difficulties can be overcome and that insurance can have the impacts that underlay the positive theoretical evaluation. At the same time, continuing analysis of the IBLI experience suggests that much remains to be done if quality index insurance contracts are to be scaled up and sustained. We conclude that insurance is not an easy, off-the-shelf solution to the problem of climate risk and food insecurity. Creativity in the technical and institutional design of contracts is still required, as are efforts to forge the more effective public-private partnerships needed to price insurance at levels that will allow insurance to fulfill its potential as part of an integrated approach to social protection and food security in an era of climate change.