Climate-Smart Agriculture Prioritization Framework

2017

Prioritize among climatesmart agricultural options and benefits for greater impact Ranking certain CSA practices over others is complex because CSA implies multiple outcomes, which vary with context and scale. All stakeholders should have access to tools and information to help them rank and prioritize CSA practices, taking different criteria and trade-offs into account. Clearly showing the benefits of certain climate-smart agricultural (CSA) interventions over others in a particular context is key to facilitating prudent investment of scarce resources.

Agricultural Systems

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is widely promoted as an approach for reorienting agricultural development under the realities of climate change. Prioritising research-for-development activities is crucial, given the need to utilise scarce resources as effectively as possible. However, no framework exists for assessing and comparing different CSA research investments. Several aspects make it challenging to prioritise CSA research, including its multi-dimensional nature (productivity, adaptation and mitigation), the uncertainty surrounding many climate impacts, and the scale and temporal dependencies that may affect the benefits and costs of CSA adoption. Here we propose a framework for prioritising agricultural research investments across scales and review different approaches to setting priorities among agricultural research projects. Many priority-setting case studies address the short-to medium-term and at relatively local scales. We suggest that a mix of actions that span spatial and temporal time scales is needed to be adaptive to a changing climate, address immediate problems and create enabling conditions for enduring change.

WIREs Climate Change, 2021

Extant systematic literature reviews on the topic of climate smart agriculture (CSA) have mainly focused on two issues: reviewing framing of the CSA discourse in the academic and policy literature; and policy initiatives in the Global South that enhance the adoption of climate‐smart agricultural practices. Yet, there is little systematic investigation into how international organizations can help smallholder farmers manage agricultural systems to respond to climate change. Analyzing these organization's priorities and highlighting their knowledge gaps are crucial for designing future pathways of CSA. We intend to use this article to identify overarching CSA themes that can guide large international organizations to focus their CSA agenda in the hope of achieving goals associated with food security and sustainable intensification. We specifically ask the following question: How have the key CSA topics and themes emerged in the gray literature of international organizations betwee...

Approaches that aim to identify and prioritize locally appropriate climate smart agriculture (CSA) technologies will need to address the context-specific multi-dimensional complexity in agricultural systems. The climate smart agriculture rapid appraisal (CSA-RA) is a mixed method approach that draws on participatory bottom-up, qualitative, and quantitative tools to assess the heterogeneity of local contexts, and prioritize context-specific CSA options. This is an imperative if countries are to respond to the COP21 agreement and meet their intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs). The CSA-RA is designed to assess biophysical including climatic, socio-cultural, economic and technological characteristics at the household, farm and community/regional level. The CSA-RA employs gender-disaggregated methods, including gender differences in perceptions of climate change and its impacts. The CSA-RA combines common participatory rural appraisal (PRA) and rapid rural appraisal (RRA) tools into one methodology, that disaggregates the gender dimension, and includes resource mapping; climate calendars; historical calendars; cropping calendars; organization mapping; transect walks; key informant interviews; farmer interviews; and pairwise ranking matrix. The tool collects qualitative and quantitative data from various stakeholders (farmers, local leaders, researchers, local-level agricultural experts , private sector actors, donor organizations, and policy implementers), allowing expansive analysis, triangu-lation and validation. Application of the CSA-RA in Tanzania and Uganda reveals heterogeneity across the sites in terms of vulnerability, constraints and CSA priorities among different social groups (gender) and agro-ecological zones. Thus, the CSA-RA allows stakeholders to simultaneously take into account biophysical and socioeconomic aspects to target and implement CSA.

2019

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA), a concept originally coined by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), has been presented as a solution to the interlinked challenges of food security and climate change. According to the FAO, CSA explicitly aims for three objectives: (1) to sustainably increase agricultural productivity to support equitable increases in farm incomes, food security and development; (2) to adapt and build resilience to climate change at multiple levels; and (3) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. This definition of CSA is central to ongoing debates between different groups of stakeholders, such as NGOs and policy-makers in developed and developing countries, over what exactly constitutes CSA, e.g. does it encompass large-scale industrial agriculture and small-scale agriculture, organic and non-organic farming practices, and which associated practices fall in its ambit. Thus, to frame CSA’s efficacy for the future, it is impo...

Cahiers Agricultures, 2018

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is an approach to help agricultural systems worldwide, concurrently addressing three challenge areas: increased adaptation to climate change, mitigation of climate change, and ensuring global food securitythrough innovative policies, practices, and financing. It involves a set of objectives and multiple transformative transitions for which there are newly identified knowledge gaps. We address these questions raised by CSA within three areas: conceptualization, implementation, and implications for policy and decision-makers. We also draw up scenarios on the future of the CSA concept in relation to the 4 per 1000 Initiative (Soils for Food Security and Climate) launched at UNFCCC 21st Conference of the Parties (COP 21). Our analysis shows that there is still a need for further interdisciplinary research on the theoretical foundation of the CSA concept and on the necessary transformations of agriculture and land use systems. Contrasting views about implementation indicate that CSA focus on the "triple win" (adaptation, mitigation, food security) needs to be assessed in terms of science-based practices. CSA policy tools need to incorporate an integrated set of measures supported by reliable metrics. Environmental and social safeguards are necessary to make sure that CSA initiatives conform to the principles of sustainability, both at the agriculture and food system levels.

Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 2019

Access under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO license from springer.com. This book contains 25 chapters on the potentials of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) as an approach to adapt to climate change globally, especially in developing countries heavily dependent on rain-fed agriculture. CSA is a broad concept encompassing efforts to build climate resilience and adaptive capacity to improve agricultural growth for food security. This book provides the conceptual, empirical and policy basis for CSA. The book is divided into three sections. The first section is an overview of the CSA concept and how it relates to economic principles. It is clarified how the concepts of resilience, adaptive capacity, technology adoption, innovation and institutions relate to each other and the economics of CSA. Lipper and Zilberman discuss how the concept of CSA has been reshaped by actors involved in developing and implementing it. The authors discuss controversies related to CSA, for example, its relationship with sustainable agriculture, the role of agricultural mitigation and carbon financing in developing countries. It is argued that CSA is an approach to manage climate change under heterogeneous socioeconomic and agro-ecological conditions. It is neither a prescription of technologies nor a perspective to resolve the controversies. In the next chapter, McCarthy et al. beautifully articulate the lack of coherence in the CSA approach. They propose a formal economic concept based on a dynamic optimization problem wherein a social planner seeks to maximize expected discounted welfare from agriculture, both now and in the future. The last chapter in this section, by Zilberman et al., frames agricultural innovation as an effective adaptation and mitigation to climate change. The second, and the largest, section provides empirical evidence on CSA regarding vulnerability assessment and how this can be used to build adaptive capacity at policy, system and farm levels. Chapters 5-9 provide state-ofthe-art contemporary tools such as near real-time satellite observations, advanced econometric models, crop statistical models and fine-tuned simulation-based integrative decision support methods. These methods are shown with case studies from Africa, Asia and the US. Specifically, it is argued that capacity limitations to apply sophisticated tools could be a foreseeable challenge but can be overcome through targeted human capital development. The subsequent empirical chapters (Chapters 10-23) illustrate adaptive capacity through a range of policy instruments. These include social protection, microfinance, microinsurance, input subsidies and agricultural knowledge, and

Academia Letters, 2022

This short paper discusses the possible reasons why there is still the limited use of vernacular building materials and techniques for the delivery of green buildings in Ghana. The idea behind this discussion stems from a previous study carried out by a team of researchers to examine Ghanaian built environment professionals' views on vernacular building materials and techniques for green construction in Ghana. The paper begins with a brief introduction to green construction and efforts towards its implementation in Ghana. It moves on to discuss issues relating to using vernacular building materials and techniques being a true reflection of green construction in Ghana. An important question is then posed as to why there is still the limited use of vernacular building materials and techniques in Ghana and then draws its conclusion. The paper tries to come out with possible explanations for this limited adoption based on the traditional economics viewpoint, which stipulates that knowing the importance of action and not doing it is an inefficient and irrational behaviour that needs to be checked.

Times of Israel (https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-old-hebrew-ishmael-papyrus-tapping-the-brakes/), 2022

On September 7, 2022, various press outlets ran stories about a First Temple Period Hebrew papyrus, with an Old Hebrew inscription, putatively dating to the late 7th/early 6th century BCE. Four lines of text are partially preserved, with the first extant word of the first extant line reading "To Ishmael." This article (by Prof. Christopher Rollston) was published in the Times of Israel, and includes a call for caution (i.e., tapping the brakes) with regard to some of the conclusions about this papyrus...especially since it was not found on an archaeological excavation, but rather was purchased (or received as a gift) in Israel and then ended up in Montana (thus, a very striking "chain of custody").

Tạp chí Y học Việt Nam

Mục tiêu: Mô tả đặc điểm hình ảnh cộng hưởng từ (CHT) sọ của các ca bệnh lao não, màng não có dấu hiệu lâm sàng (LS), được chẩn đoán xác định bằng các xét nghiệm cận lâm sàng (CLS). Đối tượng: 45 bệnh nhân (BN) được chẩn đoán xác định lao não, màng não bằng 1 trong 2 hoặc cả 2 phương pháp xét nghiệm dịch não tuỷ (DNT): Gene Xpert và nuôi cấy môi trường lỏng MGIT. Phương pháp nghiên cứu: hồi cứu, mô tả, cắt ngang. Kết quả: Tuổi TB: 28,2 ± 21,058; nam/nữ là 1,5/1; các triệu chứng: đau đầu (73,3%); nôn, buồn nôn (60%); mệt mỏi, kém ăn (62,2%); rối loạn tri giác (37,8%); chẩn đoán lâm sàng: Giai đoạn I: 26,7%; giai đoạn II: 48,9%; giai đoạn III: 24.4%. Có 84,4% thấy bất thường não trên CHT: tăng ngấm thuốc đối quang từ màng não nền sọ 66,7%; tăng ngấm thuốc khe Sylvial 2,2%; tăng ngấm thuốc bể đáy 15,6%; não úng thuỷ 31,1%; dấu hiệu “củ lao” 44,4%; dấu hiệu nhồi máu não 13,3%; tổn thương không ngấm thuốc 2,2%. Không có trường hợp nào xuất hiện hình ảnh bất thường của dây thần kinh sọ nà...