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Agriculture and Rural Development

A warming world means it’s high time to rethink the composition of agricultural support

Martien van Nieuwkoop's picture
Also available in: Français 
Photo Credit: Flore de Preneuf/World Bank

From the Old Farmer’s Almanac to cutting edge satellite systems, farmers have always been in the market for weather forecasts that help them decide when to plant and harvest to mitigate climate risks. Earlier this month, the 48th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change delivered sobering news: the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR1.5) concluded that climate impacts are already occurring and will be much worse at 2°C than previously projected.

I’ll take my coffee green, no cream, no sugar

Ellysar Baroudy's picture
Photo credit: Katie O’Gara

Ethiopia, the single largest African coffee producer and the world’s fifth largest, is commonly considered to be the birthplace of coffee.  It’s hardly a surprise that when you survey the landscape of Ethiopia’s Oromia region, an area the size of Italy, it is bespeckled with native Coffea arabica farms. 
 
In Ethiopia, about 95 percent of the coffee is produced by an estimated 1.2 million smallholder farmers. So it was quite fitting to focus on the country’s smallholder coffee farmers in Oromia for a project to help promote climate-smart “green” practices.
 
This week, the World Bank Group’s BioCarbon Fund Initiative for Sustainable Forest Landscapes (ISFL) announced it was taking part in a project together with the Bank Group’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), along with the international coffee company, Nespresso and the non-profit, TechnoServe.

The challenge to be climate smart with the world’s agriculture

Juergen Voegele's picture

Also available in: Spanish - French - Arabic

The West Africa Agriculture Productivity Program (WAAPP). Photo Credits: Dasan Bobo/The World Bank

Here’s something you may not be aware of: agriculture and changes in land use already contribute 25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a statistic that matters in the face of two unrelenting challenges now facing the globe –how to turn the promises of last December’s historic Paris climate change agreement into reality and how to feed a growing global population.

Food systems are finally on the climate change map. What’s next?

Marc Sadler's picture
 
Climate-smart crops can help feed the world. Dasan Bobo / World Bank

So, food systems are finally on the climate change map and embedded in the language of the Paris Climate Agreement.

This is a long way from the previous involvement of agriculture as a contentious area that was subject to fractious debate and fatally entwined with the discussion around climate-change related loss and damage. A vast majority of national plans to address climate change or Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) presented at the COP in Paris contained language and commitments on agriculture – for both adaptation and mitigation measures.

What’s behind this change in sentiment and action?

Thinking big: The importance of landscape-scale climate action plans ahead of Paris

Ellysar Baroudy's picture
Credit: UN-REDD Programme/Pablo Cambronero 


The countdown is now well and truly onto to the Paris climate change talks in France.

A key factor in the talks will be the national plans, known as the INDCs - Intended Nationally Determined Contributions – submitted to the UN ahead of the Paris conference. They are important building blocks for reaching a final agreement.

Given that emissions from land use contribute significantly to climate change, it’s important to note many countries have included the land sector, which covers sustainable agriculture and forestry, as a key part of their approach to mitigating climate change.

The road to a greener future

Jonathan Coony's picture

Also available in: Español



In the run-up to the COP21 climate conference, one question becomes central: where will we find the solutions on the ground—and the people to implement them—to realize the renewed political ambitions on climate?

Greenhouse gas accounting: A step forward for climate-smart agriculture

Ademola Braimoh's picture
Climate-smart agriculture in Costa Rica, video
Costa Rica is putting climate-smart agriculture to use. Watch the video.


Agriculture is central to feeding the world and reducing poverty.
 
But conventional forms of agriculture are often unsustainable and drive land degradation. Agriculture is also the world’s leading anthropogenic source of methane (52 percent) and nitrous oxide (84 percent) emissions, and the principal driver of deforestation worldwide. Agriculture and agriculture-driven land-use change contribute 24 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
 
We can’t fix what we don’t measure, which is why quantifying greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural production is a necessary step for climate-smart agriculture (CSA). Greenhouse gas accounting can provide the numbers and data that are important to solid decision making.

To get to net zero emissions, we need healthy landscapes

Rachel Kyte's picture
A project restoring degraded hillsides in China. Li Wenyong/World Bank

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tells us that to rein in climate change and keep global warming under 2°C, we will have to start reducing emissions now and get to near net zero emissions within this century.

That won’t happen without healthy forests and soil storing carbon, and it won’t happen without climate-smart land-use practices that can keep carbon in the ground.

Together, agriculture, forestry and other land use changes account for about a quarter of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The sector can be a powerful source of emissions, but it is also a powerful carbon sink that can absorb carbon dioxide, providing a pathway to negative emissions. The IPCC authors estimate that with both supply-side and demand-side mitigation efforts – including reducing deforestation, protecting natural forests, restoring and planting forests, improving rice-growing techniques and other climate-smart agriculture methods, changing diets, and reducing the immense amount of global food waste – we can effectively reduce a large percentage of emissions from the sector and increase carbon storage to move the needle toward net zero.

Scaling up climate action – starting now

Rachel Kyte's picture
Also available in: Español | Français | 中文

COP20 Opening Sessions. UNFCCC Photo


Over the next few months, governments worldwide will be preparing their national contributions to our collective need to combat climate change. These plans will form the foundation of a new international climate agreement to be agreed in Paris in one year’s time. Collective ambition matters now more than ever. We all have a responsibility to make the choices that will lower the risks created by decades of greenhouse gas emissions and usher in an era of job-rich, more-inclusive, cleaner economic development.
 
Scientists have provided us with a remarkable consensus. We believe that with this evidence, we have the strong foundation for action. That’s good news, because climate action has to scale up now.
 
This week and next at the UN climate negotiations in Lima (COP20), there is a sense that gridlock may be easing. The U.S. and China – the world's two largest emitters – set a strong pace last month when Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping stood together and jointly announced their top-line commitments for cutting emissions. Their pledges, along with commitments from the European Union and donor support for the Green Climate Fund, auger well for the Lima talks. But this was always billed as the finance COP, and how we finance the transition to deep decarbonization and lasting resilience requires a coming together that has eluded us to date.

All politics is local – that goes for climate solutions, too

Gary Kleiman's picture
Adding up the Benefits of Climate Action



“How do you engage a country that may not agree with your climate agenda?”

The question came last week, as I was sharing the findings of our recent report, Climate-Smart Development: Adding up the benefits of actions that help build prosperity, end poverty and combat climate change with students from the Williams College Center for Development Economics. I hope my talk answered her question. I pointed out that increasingly, decision-makers want to know if there are investment decisions they can make that address urgent development priorities and, at the same time, address the challenges of a rapidly warming world.
 
Three articles in the news this week reinforce the messages in our report and shed further light on the answer to her question. A pair of research papers point out that black carbon and ground-level ozone – air pollution associated with so-called short-lived climate pollutants, or SLCPs – are already reducing Indian agricultural yields by up to half, and that coal-fired power – a large source of air pollution including CO2 – is costing China 670,000 deaths each year. These are both prime examples of local development issues that present climate-smart investment choices. As governments search for solutions to their health and agriculture problems that are exacerbated by air pollution, they have two options: invest in smoke stack controls and other interventions that eliminate the air pollution causing crop loss and mortality, but keep churning out CO2, or invest in alternative energy sources and efficiency measures that will also reduce both forms of climate pollution. 

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