Day 2
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Food system resilience in the context of climate-smart agricultureJasmine room
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The food systems of all nations are exposed to a range of current and future challenges in a variety of ways. These include climate change, extreme weather and natural resource depletion, concurrent with substantial changes in socio-economic-cultural conditions and dietary patterns. Some of these changes are gradual (e.g. global mean temperature increase, demographics, dietary change, cultural evolution, sea-level rise), and can be thought of as increasing stresses. Others can be sudden (e.g., extreme weather events, financial market crashes, disease outbreaks, political volatility, trade wars, conflict), and are thought of as shocks. This then leads to the questions of how can the resilience of our food systems policies be enhanced in the face of these stresses and shocks, how they impact different food system actors differently, and to what extent can CSA enhance food system resilience?
The session will open with an overview paper on resilience concepts drawing on results emerging from the “Resilience of the UK Food System in a Global Context” programme, and an associated OECD study of the resilience of the Australian food system. Key aspects include the notions of ‘robustness’, ‘recovery’ and ‘reorientation’. Two short invited papers (possibly drawn from submitted abstracts) will offer examples of how CSA strategies can enhance food system resilience. It will then have an open discussion drawing in chosen respondents and comments from the floor to address the question “How can these experiences enhance food system resilience in developing countries?”.
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Dawn of a new ERA: A launch eventHibiscus room
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Farm- and field-level technologies and management practices represent a core component of most climate-smart agriculture (CSA) interventions. Regional and national policies are constructed around them, investments are structured to catalyze adoption of them and climate-smart services create differentiated products based on them. The centrality of farming practices and technologies make it an imperative that program developers and implementers have the best information available on their effect on productivity, resilience and emissions (i.e., their climate-smartness) to design efficient and effective CSA policies, programs and products. Until now, however, little empirical evidence has been put forth to systematically support which management practices and technologies are or are not CSA.
This session will launch The CSA Compendium. The Compendium is a novel big data platform built around the largest agricultultural meta-analysis to date. The Compendium contains more than 75,000 data points from approximately 1,600 scientific studies conducted in Africa that describe the impacts of agricultural technologies on more than 50 indicators of productivity and resilience (e.g., net returns, yield stability, soil carbon, resource use efficiency). This core combines with a rich dataverse of climate, soil, and social information (e.g., distance to market) to produce an unparalleled resource to support science-based decision making and identifying locally adapted but scalable options.
The event will use a mixture of approaches to showcase the power of and use cases for the Compendium. We will use presentations to describe the Compendium at a high level, poster roundtables to show the guts of data and what is analytically possible in small groups, and a panel where development partners outline how they plan to use the Compendium in their work. We will end the session with interactive discussions in groups to outline key steps for engagement and product evolution on the Compendium going forward.
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Scaling solar based irrigation: Learning from public and private sector initiativesFrangipani room
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Initiatives to scale solar powered irrigation systems (SPIS) throughout Africa and Asia are expanding rapidly. SPIS are seen as a cost-effective, sustainable and renewable energy solution to support water lifting for irrigation and hence food security. Whilst governments in some countries have embraced the benefits of SPIS and initiated subsidy programs to support adoption others have taken a more cautious approach, concerned about over exploitation of water resources as the marginal cost of lifting water becomes zero. The private sector has invested in new technical innovations and financial mechanisms to increase farmer accessibility and water use efficiency. If SPIS is to fulfil the expectation of a climate-smart irrigation solution, it is important to integrate sustainable water management solutions within the SPIS scaling initiatives. This session brings together the public, private, NGO and research sector from Morocco to Indonesia. It provides an interactive platform for participants to discuss successes and challenges in on- and off grid SPIS initiatives which integrate technical, financial or institutional solutions to support climate-smart scaling.
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Fostering investment in climate-smart agriculture through innovative engagement in the SADC regionBatur room
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This will be a hands-on and iterative session to share with participants an innovative complexity-aware assessment method used by CRS to assess and understand resilience, specifically related to the adaptation to climate-related shocks and stressors in CSA projects. This method has allowed the agency to:
1. Map the different pathways that people have followed in response to different types of shocks and stressors.
2. Identify coping actions, adaptive responses and transformative strategies that are fostering and/or hindering resilience capabilities.
3. Discover weak signals on: (a) emergent practices that can be amplified to build resilience, and/or (b) potential threats that need to be addressed before they escalate.
Thus, this will be a practical event that will allow participants to:
1. Experiment with complexity in the implementation and evaluation of climate-smart agriculture projects.
2. Read and discuss narratives shared by respondents who followed resilient and vulnerable pathways in response to climate-related shocks and stressors.
3. Learn about the different type of signifier questions that were designed to allow respondents to reflect and make sense of the experiences shared related to climate shock and stressors.
4. Visualize response patterns to identify actions, responses and strategies that have fostered or hindered climate change adaptation.
5. Identify emergent practices that projects or programs can promote to build resilience as well as potential threats that they need to address.
These experiential learning process will include examples from CRS practice where the method was used to conduct baseline studies for refining program design and implementation in Indonesia, Tanzania, DRC Congo, Guatemala and Nicaragua, and as part of final evaluations in Kenya and Uganda.
Day 3
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Transforming nutrition systemsBatur room
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Progress in designing and implementing effective interventions to address malnutrition has been hampered by the complexity of food and nutrition systems. While it would be impractical to include all the important factors (e.g. WHO framework on stunting, Beal et al., 2018) in a single project, it is also equally ineffective to ‘cherry pick’ specific interventions based on incomplete understanding of specific contexts (Ruel and Alderman, 2013; Gillespie and van den Bold, 2017; Lartey et al., 2018).
This workshop will explore a promising new approach for addressing malnutrition in all its forms (undernutrition, hidden hunger and overnutrition). A key strength of this new approach is a consistent focus on integration and co-ordination of normally separate and disjointed activities. Two key innovations are elaboration of an integrating nutrition system framework and the development of thematic lenses (e.g. culture, gender, environment, governance/policy) to research, monitor and evaluate specific interventions.
The workshop is particularly timely and relevant to Indonesia as this country rolls out an ambitious national program to reduce the prevalence of childhood stunting. The workshop will be jointly facilitated by UQ, LIPI, and BAPPENAS staff.
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Linking Monitoring & Evaluation for CSA to the SDGs – synergies vs. trade-offs among CSA pillarsIxora room
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Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is fundamental for tracking progress of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) initiatives toward food security, productivity, resilient livelihoods, climate change adaptation and mitigation objectives and adaptive management of projects and programs. Many actors are currently implementing CSA initiatives using different M&E frameworks and indicators. This creates an opportunity for unifying M&E frameworks for CSA. In practice, however, many issues arise: technical capacity, misalignment among institutions, double counting, etc. This is all amplified because countries are also challenged by the reporting burden under multiple global agreements, such as the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
CSA can contribute to a multitude of SDGs and features in many Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Countries need coherent guidance on CSA M&E frameworks that meet multiple goals. There is hence great potential to align CSA M&E frameworks to the reporting under the global agreements, in particular on the SDGs, and to strengthen institutional capacity to meet demands for accountability towards nationally defined CSA objectives and internationally agreed development objectives.
The proposed side event intends to develop recommendations for operational M&E frameworks for CSA, and how these can be linked with countries’ efforts on monitoring progress towards the SDGs. Drawing on the cumulative expertise and experience of the conference participants, the event aims to collect and generate ideas for developing practical solutions to this challenge and what is needed to get there.
The event will begin with a few speed talks on research and country perspectives related to CSA M&E frameworks and CSA-SDG linkages, including speakers from national governments (TBD), FAO, CGIAR research centers, the Global Resilience Partnership and WBCSD (maximum 30 minutes). The main part of the event will consist in a structured discussion involving all participants and focusing on a set of guiding questions.
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High level panel on the climate and environmental footprint of animal-source food based dietsHibiscus room
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While demand for animal-source food has increased all around the globe and will continue to do so with a growing middle class, concerns are raised on how this demand can be met sustainably. In fact, the livestock sector is one of the most important sources of greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions, which also makes it a key target for mitigation actions. Various views have emerged on the topic, with one side defending vegetarian diets or low meat consumption (e.g. EAT-Lancet commission report) and on the other side the livestock sector claiming that climate smart options are available and that livestock is necessary for land use efficiency. As a result, the debate has taken global proportions and heats up the passions.
Still, governments worldwide have to take up the challenge and meet the commitments of the Paris Agreement, i.e. limiting global warming to below 2°C by drastically reducing global emissions by 2050, while at the same time adjusting to a growing population and a changing diet. In order to bring relevant, accessible, science-based and interdisciplinary advice to facilitate decision-making processes and implement new policies or strategies, we are conveying a high-level panel discussion with multiple players including multilateral organizations, scientists, policymakers and the private sector.
The topics addressed will provide insights on (i) the livestock sector and climate change; (ii) solutions and business models to decrease emissions from the sector (CSA/diets) and (iii) the opportunities for the sector to adapt to climate change.
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Business model inspiration and ideation for scaling climate-smart agricultureVIP room
| Organized by |   |
There is great interest in scaling up Climate-Smart Agriculture, but there is a lack of successful and proven models for scaling CSA. One reason is the focus of CSA has been on developing and testing innovative CSA technologies, policies, and stakeholder processes, but less focus on designing innovative business models for scaling CSA. This side event session will be a highly interactive ideation workshop to co-design potential business models for scaling CSA. Using Human-Centered Design principles of inspiration and ideation, this workshop will bring together enthusiastic and innovative design teams to propose business models for scaling CSA around a set of different themes:
- Climate-smart seed systems;
- Climate information, agro-advisories, and extension;
- Climate-smart financial services;
- Climate-smart value chains. The workshop is expected to result in at least one prototype scaling models for each theme that could be implementation and tested for feasibility and deployment. For more information on the approaches being proposed see: http://www.designkit.org/methods
Other Parallel
Side Events
Side Events
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Using Science to Inform Actionable NDC Priorities for AgricultureDay 2 – 9 Oct | 15:00 – 16:00
| Organized by: |  |
The food systems of all nations are exposed to a range of current and future challenges in a variety of ways. These include climate change, extreme weather and natural resource depletion, concurrent with substantial changes in socio-economic-cultural conditions and dietary patterns. Some of these changes are gradual (e.g. global mean temperature increase, demographics, dietary change, cultural evolution, sea-level rise), and can be thought of as increasing stresses. Others can be sudden (e.g., extreme weather events, financial market crashes, disease outbreaks, political volatility, trade wars, conflict), and are thought of as shocks. This then leads to the questions of how can the resilience of our food systems policies be enhanced in the face of these stresses and shocks, how they impact different food system actors differently, and to what extent can CSA enhance food system resilience?
The session will open with an overview paper on resilience concepts drawing on results emerging from the “Resilience of the UK Food System in a Global Context” programme, and an associated OECD study of the resilience of the Australian food system. Key aspects include the notions of ‘robustness’, ‘recovery’ and ‘reorientation’. Two short invited papers (possibly drawn from submitted abstracts) will offer examples of how CSA strategies can enhance food system resilience. It will then have an open discussion drawing in chosen respondents and comments from the floor to address the question “How can these experiences enhance food system resilience in developing countries?”.
