With the Sept. 23 UN Climate Action Summit and other events—including the recent release of the Global Commission on Adaptation’s (GCA) flagship report—putting climate change squarely in the public eye, IFPRI researchers and guests outlined innovative approaches to climate challenges in a Sept. 19 IFPRI policy seminar.
Neil Watkins, deputy director of Agricultural Development & Nutrition at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), described how a few years ago, Bill Gates had challenged the foundation’s agriculture team to raise the profile of smallholders—who are most affected by climate change.
Their situation is urgent, as the past few years have been particularly difficult, he said: “We’re back at the levels of hunger that we saw in 2010, with conflict and climate change being two key causes.” Climate change is also one of the key drivers of global inequality, he noted, and is increasing inequality in many parts of the world.
IFPRI researchers then made a series of rapid-fire presentations on the theme of “doing more, doing better, and doing new.”
Senior Research Fellow Keith Wiebe noted that research and development (R&D) is an important driver of agricultural growth. In the 1960s, he said, most agricultural growth resulted from higher use of inputs such as land, labor, and fertilizer. “Today, most growth comes from increases in efficiency,” Wiebe said. “These increases are driven by innovation linked to investment in agricultural research and development.” Thus, R&D can help offset the impacts of climate change, he said; aggressively investing in R&D could even eliminate all of the projected negative impacts of climate change.
Addressing the shifting challenges of risk management, Senior Research Fellow Claudia Ringler stressed that traditional insurance products are not compatible with the new normal of unpredictable weather patterns. She called for a broader, more equitable and sustainable approach to risk management strategies. One example is irrigation. “We need to do better,” Ringler said, “We want to see more solar power, small-scale, women-driven, sustainable irrigation systems.” She also pointed to the GCA Digital Adaptation Atlas, a BMGF-funded tool, which combines all of the current data on climate risks farmers using it face and offers adaptation strategies, including artificial intelligence and remote sensing tools.
Senior Scientist Elizabeth Bryan emphasized the importance of adopting a gender lens toward adaptation. Men and women have different capacities for reacting to climate change, she noted, and different needs for climate information. “For example, in Senegal, women farmers were asking when the rainy season would end, since they plant their fields after they help their husbands, and were facing a shorter growing season,” Bryan said.
Though women are critical sources of knowledge about adaptation strategies such as food storage and biodiversity, they still have less decision-making power, she said. IFPRI is examining extension approaches to better deliver on climate-smart practices to women farmers, collection of gender-disaggregated data, and development of tools such as the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI).
The digital revolution is reaching smallholders and changing the delivery of extension services—a trend with important implications for climate adaptation. Senior Research Analyst Simrin Makhija outlined how knowledge is conveyed to and from farmers—including face-to-face interactions, digital-based learning (such as text messaging, community radio, and video-mediated extension by Digital Green). Innovation in agricultural technologies, and ways of sharing these tools and practices, must address climate change, she said. Extension service providers collect vast amounts of monitoring data, which should be used to evaluate the impact of extension innovations, to see whether they improve farmer knowledge and agricultural yields and practices. “Adapting to new climate realities means that we must experiment, learn, fail, and experiment again,” she concluded.
Climate change will increase the risks of pest outbreaks, leading to biodiversity loss. Increasing the adoption of ecologically-based pest management approaches (such as introducing a parasitic wasp in Thailand) would be far more preferable, economically and environmentally, to using chemical insecticides, Senior Research Fellow Wei Zhang explained. Extension services can be key to these efforts. “We need to support farmers’ access to information on what works and which technologies save money, our planet, our future,” Zhang said.
Channing Arndt, director of the Environment and Production Technology Division, summed up the food system challenges of climate change. “We’re looking at big increases in demand for calories of around 50% globally … we have to achieve that from an elevated temperature base.” The approaches laid out by his colleagues can make a huge difference if undertaken at scale, he said, pointing to the efforts of CGIAR in areas of great challenge, Africa and South Asia.
The GCA report aims to elevate the visibility of adaptation. Manish Bapna, managing director of the World Resources Institute, noted the challenges this effort faces, including the pervasive, wrong-headed perception that focusing on adaptation is the same as giving up on mitigation. In addition, though the vast economic benefits of adaptation are well-established, he said, there is still a deeply-ingrained focus on the up-front costs of climate action. Another reason for climate inaction? Politics. “Adaptation hits the poorest the hardest,” he said, “and, quite frankly, the poor have very little political voice.” Adaptation could mean modest changes for some people, but a complete change in livelihoods for others. The GCA report identifies interventions to integrate climate change resilience into different sectors.
“We do face a crisis—climate change is not coming, it’s already upon us,” said Simeon Ehui, director of Sustainable Development, Africa at the World Bank. He pointed to the food security situation in Africa, which has been quickly deteriorating, primarily because of conflict and climate change. The World Bank has launched the Africa Food Security Leadership Dialogue , he said, in response to continent-wide interest in technological innovation, evidence-based policies, and interventions that tackle climate change. The potential of digital and disruptive technologies is huge in Africa, thanks to its large youth population, Ehui said, but the region needs to build up its skill base to match the magnitude of the climate change challenge.
Sivan Yosef is a Senior Program Manager in IFPRI’s Director General’s Office.
