The Financing Landscape for Climate-Smart Agriculture

Discussions this week at the Global Conference on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change are highlighting the importance of climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts to be integrated into agricultural development strategies. As a consensus seems to be forming around the importance of this integration, attention will need to shift to the mechanisms by which this will happen. In particular, how will a transition to multi-objective climate-smart agriculture be financed? In an effort to inform these conversations, EcoAgriculture Partners has written a discussion paper, Coordinating Finance for Climate-Smart Agriculture, which presents an inventory and analysis of the potential agricultural development and climate finance sources that could be used to support climate-smart agriculture in the developing world, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa.

The paper recommends that financing systems to support these multiple objectives be closely linked so as to maximize efficiency and reduce fragmentation from sector-based solutions. However, the inventory finds that in reality funds for climate adaptation and mitigation, agricultural development, and the closely related goals of food security and sustainable land management generally come from different sources. This financing challenge becomes even more complex when climate-smart agriculture events aim to operate at a landscape scale. The paper offers six recommendations for improving coordination of finance in support of climate-smart agriculture:

1. Donors should meet current commitments and increase support for climate-smart agriculture.
2. Use international climate funds to mainstream climate considerations into agricultural investments.
3. Develop funding mechanisms and models that support integrated climate-smart agriculture.
4. Private investors can take advantage of emerging certifications and standards.
5. Coordinate investments across sectors.
6. Improve monitoring systems to track the multiple benefits of climate smart agriculture.

We hope that this paper and these recommendations will enrich the conference this week in Hanoi, and we look forward to continuing to track these issues on the blog.