Helping small farmers adapt to climate change could pay for itself - Report

By Laurie Goering

Warsaw - Helping smallholder farmers adapt to changing climate conditions and lower their risks will be crucial to ensuring food security in the future - and could pay for itself, argues a new report looking at the cost-effectiveness of adaptation.

Putting a financial value on the benefits of adaptation – from more weather-resilient rural roads that help farmers get crops to market, to new ways of making a living – is crucial because “that is ultimately what decision makers understand”, said Gernot Laganda, a climate change adaptation specialist with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), which produced the report.

Calculating economic benefits can help drive funding to adaptation and transform national agricultural policies in the ways that are needed, Laganda told journalists at the U.N. climate negotiations in Warsaw.

In Kenya’s eastern Mount Kenya region, investment in farmer field schools - to help growers adopt new agricultural technology and techniques - led to significant increases in sales of crops and livestock products such as milk, a set of IFAD case studies found.

Improving rural roads in the same area cut the cost of transporting food to market by 20 percent, and farmers who adopted soil and water conservation methods saw their harvests rise by 65 percent, IFAD said.

The introduction of efficient stoves also led to a 50 to 75 percent reduction in the volume of wood used for cooking. That, along with efforts to replant trees in the Tana River watershed, and investment in irrigation, helped boost jobs in the region and cut the time women spent collecting water and wood.

“The climate debate often overlooks how adaptation can result in economic and financial opportunities for smallholder farmers,” the IFAD report said. Farmers can cash in by diversifying their crops or finding additional sources of income, for example.

The five case studies – four of which estimate the potential benefits of future planned adaptation in Bolivia, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Turkey – suggest “it is possible to quantify the benefits that arise from adaptation investments in economic and financial terms”, and that such benefits are cost-effective, the IFAD report said.

It argues that using climate finance to fund adaptation for small-scale agriculture would be a wise investment, particularly because small farmers produce up to 80 percent of food in sub-Saharan Africa, and agriculture accounts for up to 70 percent of jobs in the world’s least-developed countries.

“Climate adaptation is proving its effectiveness in equipping smallholder farmers with the tools and practices they need to carry on their livelihoods in a future with many uncertainties,” the report said.

BOOST TO INCOMES, DEVELOPMENT

In Vietnam, for instance, IFAD estimates that measures to help farmers adapt to rising salinity in the Mekong Delta could yield benefits beyond the cost of the adaptation measures.

Persuading some farmers to abandon rice growing in favour of a mix of coconuts and sugarcane could boost household incomes by as much as $3,916 a year, the report estimates, while switches to shrimp cultivation could bring even higher incomes.

Providing farmers with better data on water salinity - through automated sensors used to produce “salinity forecasts” - could help them understand the changing conditions. And developing saline-tolerant rice and other crops, as well as a saline-tolerant catfish species, could enable them to protect their incomes, the report said, as might investing in processing facilities for coconut and cacao.

In Bangladesh’s Haor region, hit by severe annual flooding that is expected to worsen with climate change, building low-cost protective walls and stabilising slopes with vegetation could be a cost-effective strategy for farmers, the report said.

Vocational training in “profitable trades” such as motorcycle and engine repair, carpentry, brick making and establishing seed nurseries could also make farmers more resilient by diversifying their incomes.

And in southwest Bolivia - where changing weather patterns are bringing longer droughts and more extreme rainfall and wind, as well as higher temperatures - different crops and better irrigation could help raise household incomes by at least $310, and perhaps as much as $1,685 a year, the report estimated.

“These investments do not just benefit smallholder farmers, but contribute to wider development goals such as poverty reduction, functioning environmental services and cutting carbon emissions,” the report noted.

Enrico Mazzoli, an economic and financial analyst for IFAD, said that while many of the numbers in the report are estimates of benefits expected from adaptation that is only now getting underway, they are “robust and conservative”, and are based on examining the difference between continuing with current policies and making adaptive changes as the climate shifts over the next 20 years.

While global demand for food is expected to grow by at least 70 percent by 2050, in some regions of the world, adaptation will be needed simply to maintain production in the face of more extreme weather and other climate impacts, Mazzoli said.

“It’s often the case that we don’t increase anything, but we keep the production constant - which is often today the biggest challenge,” he added.