As world leaders meet at COP27 in Egypt to discuss the climate future, the lives of small-scale agricultural families hang in the balance. More than a decade of field-tested research has yielded three key ideas that can strengthen climate adaptation and resilience for those who are among the most vulnerable to climate change.
The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Markets, Risk & Resilience recommends three key evidence-based ideas that can guide development policy and practice for climate adaptation and resilience for rural communities around the globe:
Secure vulnerable households in advance of disasters
Improve financial instruments to manage risk
Target learning subsidies for climate-adapted agricultural technologies and practices
“Climate mitigation is important, but supporting adaptation will help people survive the changes that are already taking place. The impacts of climate change are already here,” said Michael Carter, director of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Markets, Risk & Resilience and distinguished professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis.
Few are more vulnerable to climate change than people who earn their living through small-scale agriculture. Climate change drove this year’s catastrophic flooding in Pakistan, Nigeria and many other nations. Climate change is also driving extreme and ongoing drought in East Africa.
Smallholder farmer and pastoralist communities can lose everything in these climate-related disasters. Responding to disasters with humanitarian aid is critical, but aid alone does not address how the risk of a disaster in itself causes hardship.
The MRR Innovation Lab’s key ideas for guiding climate adaptation and resilience respond to the reality that climate risk stunts the potential of smallholders who know they can lose everything in a bad year. This risk puts more costly but productive inputs and practices out of reach because the potential losses would be too high.
However, rigorous research shows that financial and agricultural technologies that reduce climate risk can both increase resilience in a bad year, and this sense of protection frees up households to make investments that transform their livelihoods.
The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Markets, Risk & Resilience calls these dual benefits—protection in a disaster and increased productivity in good years—Resilience+. These three recommendations leverage a Resilience+ approach that is more critical than ever as climate change puts more households at increasing risk.
Source: Voice of America