This past March, Krista Heiner, a project manager at EcoAgriculture Partners, joined hundreds of scientists, policy makers, and practitioners in Montpellier, France, who all had one mission in mind: to identify ways to achieve agricultural development in the face of climate change. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) was the center of the conversation; the international community, under the umbrella of the Climate Smart Agriculture Global Science Conference, is proposing this strategy as a way to ensure sustainable and equitable increases in agricultural productivity, increase the resilience of agricultural communities to a changing climate, and contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Here, Krista gives her insider connaissance, in conversation with colleague Lucila Fernandez, on global trends, challenges, and opportunities for climate-smart agriculture discussed in the conference.
Lucila Fernandez: What is climate-smart agriculture?
Krista Heiner: As the consequences of climate change become more apparent, there is an increasing recognition of the role of agriculture in the emission of GHGs and in the vulnerability of agriculture to the impacts of climate change. CSA has emerged as a possible solution to deal with many of these interrelated challenges. It seeks to achieve multiple goals related to increasing agricultural production, curbing GHG emissions and helping communities adapt to climate change in an integrated way. Ideally, this approach promotes agricultural practices that ultimately reduce poverty and improve access to food without contributing further to climate change.
This is an intricate approach that surely involves coordinated efforts from stakeholders at all levels of society. It is clear how a conference could be helpful. How did the Climate-Smart Agriculture Global Science Conference come into being?
The Conference was formulated as a means of developing knowledge about CSA, identifying priorities for action, and designing a roadmap for future research. This discussion is relatively new—the Montpellier meeting was only the third conference in this series. The subject is gaining traction, since it’s becoming more evident that we need to seriously consider the impact of climate change on agriculture and the contribution of agriculture to climate change in our formulation of agricultural strategies and technologies. Objectives of the CSA Conference resonate well with EcoAgriculture Partners’ mission of promoting agriculture that is good for people, food, and nature, and this year we presented the findings of a four-year study on how agricultural carbon projects could help to promote CSA.
Aqueduct in Montpellier, the city that hosted this year’s conference. Photo by Krista Heiner.
That sounds quite interesting and very in tune with the Conference’s goals. What was most interesting about it?
EcoAgriculture Partners teamed up with the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) to understand more about how carbon projects with smallholder farmers in Africa function. Through a selection process, we decided to work with two carbon projects, one managed by ECOTRUST in Uganda and the other by Vi Agroforestry in Kenya.
I think the most interesting part of the study was the approach we used. We used a Participatory Action Research model where the carbon project managers collaborated with us to design the research. Through the PAR process we worked together to formulate the research questions, design the methodology, and evaluate the impacts of various activities. Our goal was to understand ways to make these carbon projects more sustainable and scale-up the impacts of their activities. Our thoughts were: What can communities, government actors, and project managers do to make agricultural carbon projects effective in the long-term, and what kinds of institutions can enable these stakeholder groups to work collaboratively towards the common goal of establishing climate-smart agriculture systems? It seems like there has been less research on the institutional arrangements required for climate-smart agriculture to be successful, and this project attempted to understand more about those requirements.
What was the overarching theme of the CSA Conference, and how did your presentation fit in?
The conference addressed quite a diverse array of topics under the umbrella of sustainable agriculture and land management practices. Many of the presentations I saw had a heavy emphasis on technical solutions, but it seemed like there was less consideration of the institutional arrangements that would help to scale up such innovations and make them work on the ground. A lot of the conference participants who stopped by my poster were interested in learning how carbon projects operate in practice and how the efforts of smallholder farmers in these projects can be linked to the international community.
What were some of the identified challenges and strategies for climate-smart agriculture, as identified by the conference?
It seems like a lot of the research thus far has focused on smaller, farm-scale practices, and there was some momentum at this conference to shift the focus of research to understanding how to scale-up CSA. Many of the researchers at the conference recognized the need to look at the interplays between agriculture and other sectors, like environment, health and nutrition, and larger societal factors, like land tenure, to be able to scale up the impact of CSA.
Did you have any favorite presentations?
There was a lot of very interesting research presented at the conference. I especially enjoyed the presentations and posters that looked at how to implement climate-smart agriculture at a larger, landscape scale. One presentation, titled Prototyping climate-smart agricultural landscapes: a generic modelling framework and application in a tropical island, done by Jean-Marc Blazy of INRA, looked at trade-offs and synergies between CSA objectives on the island of Guadeloupe. Through models, Blazy observed how the landscape reacted as certain goals were prioritized (agricultural productivity, the maintenance of ecosystem services, mitigating climate change). It would be neat to see how EcoAgriculture Partners could work alongside researchers like Blazy to predict what a climate-smart landscape might look like in a particular context. I think it would be very powerful to use that type of information as a decision-making tool.
What’s the next step for EcoAgriculture Partners in the CSA Conference?
EcoAgriculture Partners is part of the Global Alliance on Climate-Smart Agriculture. Through our participation, we hope to have an impact by making sure landscape-scale considerations are central to the discussions. The next CSA conference will be in Africa, and I hope we can play a leading role at that conference in demonstrating how climate smart landscapes can be implemented on the ground.
Comments are closed.