Walsh, Conor ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4829-2754, Renn, Mara, Klauser, Dominik, De Pinto, Alessandro ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0327-494X, Haggar, Jeremy ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4682-4879, Abdur, Rouf, Hopkins, Richard ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4935-5825 and Zamil, Farhad (2024) Translating theory into practice: a flexible decision-making tool to support the design and implementation of climate-smart agriculture projects. Agricultural Systems, 219:104060. ISSN 0308-521X (Print), 1873-2267 (Online) (doi:10.1016/j.agsy.2024.104060)

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Abstract

CONTEXT: Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is a conceptual framework for responding climate-related risk in agriculture across the three pillars of Mitigation, Resilience, and Production. Existing tools have been developed which seek to operationalise the CSA concept to evaluate and benchmark progress; each of which have their own relative strengths and weaknesses.
OBJECTIVE: The translation of this concept into actionable projects/portfolios hence requires the careful evaluation of potential trade-offs and synergies between these three pillars. The hereby presented decision-making tool aims to offer a basis for a structured evaluation of such trade-offs and synergies.
METHODS: It does so by assessing five different outcome pathways on how they contribute to a project’s performance across the three pillars of CSA. We aspire that the use of this tool will allow for more deliberate design and implementation of projects in agricultural development, increasing the resilience and productivity of farming systems whilst ensuring the sustainable use of the environmental resource-based agriculture depends on.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: This tool was applied in a workshop setting to evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of two distinct projects; demonstrating the utility in visualising the same performance in different ways. Of particular importance was ability to demonstrate how focusing on productivity and adaptation may trade-off mitigation activities.
SIGNIFICANCE: The results of the case study application demonstrated the challenge in meeting all the CSA requirements; particularly where the main objective of a project is to enhance and increase productivity. This reinforces how supporting all three pillars is challenging for a single project and therefore CSA is arguably more achievable when viewed in terms of a portfolio of activities which can collectively compensate for the limitations of a single project.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	climate smart agriculture; project; portfolio; trade-offs; resilience
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GE Environmental Sciences Q Science > Q Science (General) S Agriculture > S Agriculture (General)
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Engineering & Science Faculty of Engineering & Science > Natural Resources Institute Faculty of Engineering & Science > Natural Resources Institute > Centre for Sustainable Agriculture 4 One Health
Last Modified:	15 Jul 2024 15:34
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/47607

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