Monitoring adaptation to enhance food security: a survey of approaches and best practice

As adaptation to climate change is a major theme for CCAFS, the programme needs a method for monitoring and evaluating interventions intended to foster adaptation and enhance adaptive capacity across food systems. This report explored current approaches to monitoring and evaluation of climate change adaptation projects and specifically how food security outcomes are being addressed. It emerged that monitoring and evaluation of adaptation projects is fairly new, and most documents outline frameworks rather than report on specific experiences. This was particularly true for food security per se, which was not an explicit focus of many of the adaptation projects that were assessed. This made it difficult to summarize best practice and to describe the most reliable indicators for assessing impacts of adaptation interventions on food security outcomes. Consequently, in line with recent discussions within CCAFS about the goals of using monitoring and evaluation to foster adaptive management and social learning the approach was shifted toward an outcome- oriented focus. This promotes active learning from monitoring and evaluation as the programme activities are implemented

Peri-urban agriculture: Opportunities for sustainable and climate friendly livestock

Session: Blue sky thinking: The dragon's de

Innovation platforms to support natural resource management

Available in Chinese, English, Hindi, Thai and Vietnames

Livestock drought management tool

Final report for project submitted by ILRI to the FAO Sub-Regional Emergency and Rehabilitation Officer for East and Central Africa 10 December 2010In August 2010, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) sub-Regional Emergency Office for Eastern and Central Africa (REOA) contracted the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) to develop a proto-type “Livestock Drought Management” (LDM) decision support tool for use by a range of emergency and relief planners and practitioners throughout the region. The tool, which is still conceptual rather than operational, links the concepts of Drought Cycle Management (DCM) with the best practice in livestock-related interventions throughout all phases of a drought, from normal through the alert and emergency stages to recovery. The tool uses data to indicate the severity of the drought (Hazard) and the ability of livestock to survive the drought (sensitivity). The hazard information in the LDM tool is based on Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI) captured by the NOAA AVHRR system. The tool suggests that the best indicator for sensitivity is livestock body condition (LBC). It combines these two indicators, using expert opinion, to define the phase of the Drought Cycle. The hazard data has currently been parameterized for Kenya, but can be used in any of the REOA countries. At the moment, the missing item is good quality data for sensitivity. Additionally, experts did not agree on how to define the phase of the drought cycle. The tool requires pilot testing in a few local areas before it can be rolled out everywhere

Cost–benefit analysis of fodder production as a low emissions development strategy for the Kenyan dairy sector

Livestock production is a promising agricultural sector to explore in view of achieving greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction, given that it is the largest source of emissions from agriculture. The combination of economic importance and high emissions intensities makes the Kenyan livestock sector a good opportunity for investment in low emissions development strategies. Ten low emissions development (LED) interventions for the livestock sectors in Kenya and Ethiopia were reviewed in a previous study (Ericksen and Crane 2018). From these, one intervention was selected for further analysis— improving availability of quality feeds for the smallholder dairy subsector, specifically by improving forages. The rationale for this is that access to adequate feed availability and quality are a prerequisite to any other productivity improvements such as improved breeds. The intervention is most suited to intensive and semi-intensive dairy because it requires collection and, ideally, storage of fodder to feed to animals that reside on farms, with limited grazing