Prioritising climate-smart agricultural interventions: The financial aspects
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, of which some focus on the financial considerations for prioritization. One of the papers (PDF) by Sain et al. uses probabilistic cost benefit analysis to assess eight CSA practices. Indicators related to profitability and valuation of environmental and social externalities are used to assess options. The case study assessment suggests that most of the potential CSA practices are profitable, although some may have a long payback period, which may be a barrier for smallholder farmers. Another article by Khatri-Chhetri et al. (PDF) applies a participatory scoring and bidding approach to understand farmers’ preferences and willingness-to-pay for preferred CSA technologies. The paper presents that farmers’ preferences for CSA technologies are marked by some commonalities as well as differences according to their rainfall pattern, income, age, gender, and cost of implementation. This results also showed that farmers may not be always willing to invest their own money on many CSA technologies even if there are foreseen benefits. The methods could be used by government and other stakeholders to design and implement a climate change adaptation programme in agriculture.