Prioritising climate-smart agricultural interventions at different scales
This special of Agricultural Systems focuses on prioritising climate-smart agricultural (CSA) interventions at different scales. Currently, there are few tools that can comprehensively evaluate the range of potential technologies and practices and their possible impacts on food production, environmental sustainability, and mitigation in any context. Therefore, what remains is the prioritization of interventions for investment and broad dissemination. There is a growing body of work by several CGIAR centres and their partners on tools and methods that can be used to prioritise CSA interventions and investments at a range of spatial and temporal scales. This special issue brings together nine papers describing a wide range of approaches and tools. One of the papers (PDF) by Notenbaert et al. describe a generic framework for evaluating and prioritising potential CSA interventions. This entails an iterative process of mapping out recommendation domains, assessing adoption potential and estimating impacts. The paper notes that decision-making processes that are part of planning for CSA are invariably multi-stakeholder, multi-scale and multi-objective in nature. Another paper (PDF) by Mwongera et al. present the climate smart agriculture rapid appraisal (CSA-RA) tool. This uses mixed methods and draws on participatory bottom-up, qualitative, and quantitative tools to assess the heterogeneity of local contexts, and prioritize context-specific options. It is an innovative combination of gender-disaggregated methods and climate analysis. The CSA-RA allows stakeholders to simultaneously take into account biophysical and socio-economic aspects to target and implement CSA.