Gender Marker 1

The maize-legume system cropping guide is a practical 88 manual focusing on good agricultural practices for maize-legume production that promote integrated soil fertility management.

The Climate-Smart Agriculture Sourcebook comprises a wide range of knowledge and expertise on the concept of CSA to better guide policy makers, programme managers, sectoral experts, academics, extensionists, as well as practitioners to make the agricultural sectors (crops, livestock, fisheries and forestry) more sustainable and productive, while responding to the challenges of climate change and food security.

Climate-smart agriculture seeks to increase sustainable productivity, strengthen farmers’ resilience, reduce agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions and increase carbon sequestration. It strengthens food security and delivers environmental benefits. Climate-smart agriculture includes proven practical techniques — such as mulching, intercropping, conservation agriculture, crop rotation, integrated crop-livestock management, agroforestry, improved grazing, and improved water management — and innovative practices such as better weather forecasting, more resilient food crops and risk insurance.

Alternate wetting and drying (AWD) is a rice management practice that reduces water use by up to 30% and can save farmers money on irrigation and pumping costs. AWD reduces methane emissions by 48% without reducing yield. Efficient nitrogen use and application of organic inputs to dry soil can further reduce emissions. Incentives for adoption of AWD are higher when farmers pay for pump irrigation.

Conservation agriculture is an approach to agricultural management based on three principles: Minimum soild disturbance, Retention of crop residues or otehr soil surface cover; Use of crop rotations

Why do we need climate-smart agriculture? This brief overview answers key questions about Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA): what it is, what makes it different, what are the main elements, and what actions are needed to implement CSA.

This information brief highlights key findings in the Vuna report “Agribusiness Responses to Climate Risks: Implications for Improving Smallholder Resilience”

- This paper presents a review of the commercial sustainability, profitability, challenges, impact, and potential contribution of weather index insurance (WII) products to improving resilience in weather-affected agricultural systems in developing countries. This is important given the continuing demand on governments to manage the considerable weather risk faced by smallholders in Sub-Saharan Africa and other weather-exposed regions in developing economies.

This assessment has been developed in a two-step process. First, a literature review was conducted summarising the global experience in developing weather index insurance programmes. Second, we conducted a field investigation designed to extract a more detailed understanding of whether the results of recently launched WII pilots in Sub-Saharan Africa (in Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) are in line with the global experience.

Crop yields in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are typically less than half of yields in the developed world. With growing populations, and with climate change already beginning to put downward pressure on crop yields, intervention is urgently needed to enable farmers in SSA to produce more food. A key first step is to ensure that farmers have greater, and more reliable, access to high-quality seed of the modern varieties of climate smart crops that will best equip them to both feed themselves and produce food for barter or sale.

In many cases, breeding work for new varieties has been done. Farmers, however, are unaware of the new varieties, or seed of these varieties is not reaching them at meaningful levels. As a result, potential farmer yield and overall production levels for the target crops are not realised. The opportunity cost associated with this is significant and, without intervention, will grow as the effects of climate change increase.

This information brief highlights key findings of the Vuna report “Transformational Adaptation to Climate Change: Concepts, Examples, and Relevance for Agriculture in Eastern and Southern Africa.”