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Future-proofing water, agriculture, and food security in an era of climate uncertainty in India.

Southern African Agriculture and Climate Change: A Comprehensive Analysis examines the food security threats facing eight of the countries that make up southern Africa — Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe — and explores how climate change will increase the efforts needed to achieve sustainable food security throughout the region. Southern Africa’s population is expected to grow at least through mid-century. The region will also see income growth. Both will put increased pressure on the natural resources needed to produce food, and climate change makes the challenges greater. Southern Africa is already experiencing rising temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, and increasing extreme events. Without attention to adaptation, the poor will suffer.

The CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and partners developed a website presenting the climate-smart agriculture (CSA) approach to food security and sustainable development. The website aims to help practitioners, researchers and decision-makers working with or interested in CSA. The site helps you get started and guide you on the ground, connecting you with all the resources you need to dig deeper. For countries following up on their commitments under the Paris Agreement, CSA Guide is a useful tool to set up mitigation and adaptation initiatives in agriculture.

The website is divided into six parts:

The basics - The basics section provides users with crucial information about what climate-smart agriculture is, how it helps address important challenges, how it is different from other sustainable agriculture approaches, and suggests introductory reading materials and videos.

Entry points - The next section gives an introduction into the numerous entry points for initiating CSA programmes. To help users navigate among them, they are presented under three thematic areas: Practices, Systems approaches and Enabling environments.

Develop a CSA plan - The website presents a specific approach to develop a CSA plan. This section was developed to provide a guide for operationalizing CSA planning, implementation and monitoring at scale. It consists of four subsections: Situation analysis, Targeting and prioritization, Programme support, and Monitoring, evaluation and learning.

Finance - The finance section offers an overview of potential sources of funding for CSA activities as national, regional and international levels. It also includes options to search among a range of funding opportunities according to CSA focus area, sector and financing instrument.

Resource library - In the resource library, users have access to all the references, key resources, key terms and frequently asked questions to get a quick overview that can be used as part of or independently of the other sections.

Case studies - And finally, the case studies section shows all the specific projects that are detailed in the basics and entry point sections. The interactive map allows users to view all case studies at once or filter the search by entry points. An extensive portfolio of content, a highly visual design, and user friendly interface will allow users to find specific points of interest or follow the flow of information from the basics section, over entry points to CSA, CSA plan, CSA finance, a resource library and case studies. 

CCARDESA ICKM System overview pamphlet.

CCARDESA aspires to be a regional knowledge hub that facilitates the sharing of agricultural information and research across the SADC region. Thus, CCARDESA has incorporated knowledge, information and communication as one of the key Thematic Focal Areas of the organisation.

CCARDESA undertakes programmes and projects that promote knowledge generation, knowledge management and dissemination of agricultural research through the utilization of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), among others. CCARDESA strives to ensure that credible information is made accessible to all interested stakeholders from policy makers to smallholder farmers.

Cassava is the second-most important staple food crop after maize in Malawi. The availability of different varieties of cassava allow for both commercial use and household consumption of cassava to hedge against food insecurity. Malawi is prone to drought due to climate change vulnerability, poor agricultural practices and high population growth making cassava, a drought-resistant crop, an attrac- tive option.

This study sets out to answer the question of whether cassava is, indeed, the 21st century crop for smallholders. The focus lies on smallholder production sys- tems in Nkhotakota District on the shores of Lake Malawi and in the rural vicinity of Lilongwe, the capital city. A nexus between the household asset endowments of smallholder farmers and their participation in the value chain was examined to identify root causes of the supply-demand mismatch and to formulate recom- mendations for effective value chain development. A partial value chain analysis has been conducted to account for the participation of smallholders in the value chain. We chose a structural analysis over an economic analysis, as prices are high- ly volatile in the informal markets of Malawi and notoriously difficult to solicit from actors. Since the responsibility for the production of food and cash crops falls broadly along gender lines within a household, gender aspects take a central role in our research. All our instruments included gender differentiated elements.

Sustainability of rain-fed farming systems under climate variability and change conditions is a key concern for policy and adaptation planning processes to improve food and nutrition security. The challenge is to improve farming and tillage practices to enhance soil moisture availability and harvest excess runoff thereby making the farming systems more reliable and resilient to unpredictable risks of climate change and variability. In this short manuscript, an assessment of climate change impact on the agricultural water availability for rainfed systems in southern Africa is discussed through a pilot project conducted recently as part of climate change adaptation integrated modeling of crop-climate-soil systems. We consider the Pandamatenga plains in north-eastern Botswana, which was undertaken with the main indicators of crop yield impact with respect to soil water availability and excess runoff harvesting potential, for the current climatology (1971-2000) and projected over the coming decades up to the 2050s. The indicators of rainfed practices of growing maize, sorghum and sunflower are discussed, which are likely influenced not only by climate, but also the response requiring local and regional adaptation investments for improved food security and increase productivity. The manuscript recommends technical and policy interventions for incorporating climate change adaptation practices, with the view to outscale to national and possibly regional agricultural development planning processes.

This presentation discusses enhancing evidence based climate change adaptation research and policy for agriculture in southern Africa.

Agriculture is a risky business and farmers face a host of market and production risks that make their incomes volatile from year to year. These risks include yield losses due to bad weather, pests and diseases; post-harvest losses during storage and transport; and unexpectedly low market prices. In many cases, farmers are also confronted by the risk of catastrophic losses, for example, when crops or livestock are destroyed by drought, re or new pest outbreaks, or when lives and assets are lost due to extreme weather events like hurricanes and oods. These risks can pose challenging nancial problems even for large commercial farms in developed countries, but the consequences for vast numbers of smallholders around the developing world are much more severe. Major shocks to household incomes, food consumption and assets worsen poverty and lead to episodic humanitarian crises that require large- scale relief interventions.

CCARDESA's Climate Change Adaptation Strategy: Evidence from CCARPASA Project

Improving agricultural water productivity, under rainfed or irrigated conditions, holds significant scope for addressing climate change vulnerability. It also offers adaptation capacity needs as well as water and food security in the southern African region. In this study, evidence for climate change impacts and adaptation strategies in rainfed agricultural systems is explored through modeling predictions of crop yield, soil moisture and excess water for potential harvesting. The study specifically presents the results of climate change impacts under rainfed conditions for ma- ize, sorghum and sunflower using soil-water-crop model simulations, integrated based on daily inputs of rainfall and evapotranspiration disaggregated from GCM scenarios. The research targets a vast farming region dominated by heavy clay soils where rainfed agriculture is a dominant prac- tice. The potential for improving soil water productivity and improved water harvesting have been explored as ways of climate change mitigation and adaptation measures. This can be utilized to explore and design appropriate conservation agriculture and adaptation practices in similar agro-ecological environments, and create opportunities for outscaling for much wider areas. The results of this study can suggest the need for possible policy refinements towards reducing vulne- rability and adaptation to climate change in rainfed farming systems.