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March 23rd, 2020

Climate-smart agriculture and the SDGs: Mapping interlinkages, synergies and trade-offs and guidelines for integrated implementations

Published by FAO,

This publication (PDF) by the FAO presents an assessment and mapping of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) – Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) interlinkages, which provide entry points for targeted CSA planning to enchance syngergies and reduce potential tradeoffs between CSA objectives and SDGs. Key messages of the publication include: 1) CSA actions can support achievements of all SDGs. Assessment and mapping of CSA-SDG interlinkages identifies key categories of climate-smart agriculture actions under each of the three CSA pillars, and assess how each category relates to the various SDG targets. 2) Instances may arise where a CSA action intended to advance one SDG objective creates a trade-off related to another. These trade-offs are not unavoidable, and careful planning can ensure that they are minimized. 3) In many instances, the SDGs form the basis of countries national development planning. This presents opportunities to maximize synergies and avoid duplication of efforts related to planning, implementation and reporting. As such, there is value in considering these agendas jointly, and how best to support them, when it comes to developing a climate-smart agriculture approach. 4) Good practice in developming a CSA-approach should involve: creating the evidence base for the approach ; supporting enabling policies and planning ; strengthening national and local institutions ; enhancing access to finance ; implementing practices in the field. Monitoring and evaluation is a key element for successful iterative implementation and should be integrated throughout the implementation steps. 5) All these steps can be implemented in a manner that supports the relevance of CSA in the context of a country’s integrated efforts to achieve the SDGs and nationally determined contribution (NDC). This paper represents a first step in defining specific ways in which CSA can support the achievement of the SDG  and NDC objectives. Next steps may include: developing a methodology to assess context-specific synergies and trade-offs between CSA actions and SDG targets, as well as identifying the relationships between CSA and SDG indicators.

Curated from fao.org