South Asia is one of the regions of the world most vulnerable to climate change impacts. Agriculture, which much of South Asia’s population depends on for a living, is particularly vulnerable; estimates show that 10%-50% of the region’s crop production could be lost by the end of the century due to global warming.
Aiming to develop evidence-based strategies to address this threat, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Agriculture Centre (SAC), the SAARC Development Fund (SDF), and IFPRI have launched the Consortium for Scaling-up Climate Smart Agriculture in South Asia (C-SUCSeS).
The consortium—introduced at a November 24, 2021 launch event in Dhaka, Bangladesh—will integrate climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies with the overarching goal of ensuring food, nutrition, and livelihood security.
Currently, South Asia is home to more than a quarter of the world’s hungry and undernourished people and will likely need to double its food production to feed its burgeoning population, expected to reach 2.68 billion by 2050. Before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the South Asian economy was the world’s fastest-growing, but the pandemic now poses many challenges. Those include progress reaching the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, and achieving both growth and sustainability in agriculture.
“Given what is at stake, SAC has taken this far-reaching initiative to promote sustainable and resilient agriculture intensification in South Asia,” said SAARC Secretary General Esala Ruwan Weerakoon.
The central idea is to introduce a paradigm shift in the design of South Asia’s agricultural programs and interventions that couples enhanced resilience with greater efficiency in natural resource use at the farm level—prioritizing farming systems most vulnerable to climate change and environmental degradation. Collective action can make a difference for millions of smallholders and enhance regional cooperation in agriculture, said SAC Director Md. Baktear Hossain, ultimately contributing to achieve “the shared goals and vision of SAARC.”
The multi-country project, the first of its kind in the region, is a step towards implementing climate smart agriculture (CSA) across South Asia. SAC will play a central role in encouraging regional cooperation among SAARC members. At the event, member state representatives outlined their roles and responsibilities. “We hope that our collective support will augment the continuous efforts of all the member states towards enhancing the adaptive capacity of especially our smallholder farmers against the impacts of climate change,” said Anuj Goel, Officer-In-Charge of SDF and Director, Social Window.
Climate smart agriculture is the key to putting farming and rural economies on a resilient path that can help countries achieve the Paris Climate Agreement’s nationally determined contributions in reduced carbon emissions, reach carbon neutrality, and help to keep climate change in check. The consortium will conduct a thorough mapping exercise on climate impacts to identify vulnerable agro-ecosystems, as well as promising technologies and practices. Many CSA technologies are already in use, said IFAD Lead Regional Economist Abdelkarim Sma. “The idea is just to accelerate that uptake, and upscale, expand it—make it something more mainstream, which would be embedded in the strategies of all these countries,” he said.
The consortium will support the identification and scaling-up of viable CSA interventions among SAARC countries through national policies, working to set up effective mechanisms for knowledge sharing, policy dialogue, and cooperation in R&D programs. IFPRI South Asia Director Shahidur Rashid said that one of the main objectives, from IFPRI’s perspective, is to strengthen SAC’s capacity to engage in research and to bring “access to global knowledge, technology and know-how to this platform, to the member country scientists and the institutions, so that they can engage in top class social, policy and scientific research.”
The project will target about 7,500 smallholders, with a special focus on women farmers, for piloting and scaling up of CSA technologies, as well as researchers, extension workers, and policymakers. An additional 50,000 smallholders will indirectly benefit from scaling up activities and the strategies developed under the initial pilot investment of $3.1 million, co-financed by SAC, IFPRI and SDF.
Anisha Mohan is a Communications Associate with IFPRI-South Asia.
