Measuring Progress Towards the WBCSD Statement of Ambition on Climate-Smart Agriculture: Improving Businesses’ Ability to Trace, Measure and Monitor CSA

At the Paris climate summit in 2015, the World Business Council on Sustainable Development (WBCSD) announced a set of 2030 ambitions under the three pillars of climate smart agriculture (CSA), namely productivity, resilience and mitigation. Based on work under WBCSD’s workstream to improve businesses’ ability to trace, measure and monitor CSA, this working paper provides (a) a simple framework, (b) sets of recommended indicators, and (c) a stock-take of the current status of CSA progress under each of the three pillars, both globally and among WBCSD member companies. The purpose is to inform future monitoring and reporting on CSA among member companies, both individually and collectively. For pillar 1, productivity, we are exceeding targets for global food production. However, we have less information on whether this food is nutritious, available and affordable, or whether we are achieving higher productivity per unit of input, and sustainable use of resources, not just higher production. For pillar 2, resilience, there is insufficient company or global data to monitor the resilience and welfare of agricultural communities and landscapes under climate change. A high priority is collection of activity data on provision and adoption of positive environmental (e.g. agroecological) and social (e.g. climate information and financial) approaches among farmers. For pillar 3, mitigation, we are falling behind targets for agricultural and food system emissions. While there have been some impressive improvements in emissions intensity for some foods and beverages, increasing levels of production mean that absolute emissions are rising. This early snapshot of progress can hopefully stimulate shared learning and renewed investment, ahead of future collective reporting by WBCSD

Is Climate-Smart Agriculture effective? A review of selected cases

Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) is an approach to address the interlinked challenges of food security and climate change, and has three objectives: (1) sustainably increasing agricultural productivity, to support equitable increases in farm incomes, food security and development; (2) adapting and building resilience of agricultural and food security systems to climate change at multiple levels; and (3) reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture (including crops, livestock and fisheries). This paper examines 19 CSA case studies, to assess their effectiveness in achieving the stated objectives of CSA, while also assessing other cobenefits, economic costs and benefits, barriers to adoption, success factors, and gender and social inclusion issues. The analysis concludes that CSA interventions can be highly effective, achieving the three CSA objectives, while also generating additional benefits in a costeffective and inclusive manner. However, this depends on context specific project design and implementation, for which institutional capacity is key. The paper also identifies serious gaps in data availability and comparability, which restricts further analysis

Climate Smart Agriculture in the African Context

Agriculture remains vital to the economy of most African countries and its development has significant implications for food security and poverty reduction in the region. Increase in agricultural production over the past decades has mainly been due to land area expansion, with very little change in production techniques and limited improvement in yields. Currently one in four people remains malnourished in Africa. CSA integrates all three dimensions of sustainable development and is aimed at (1) sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and incomes; (2) adapting and building resilience to climate change from the farm to national levels; and (3) developing opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture compared with past trends. It is an approach to identify the most suitable strategies according to national and local priorities and conditions to meet these three objectives. There is no such thing as an agricultural practice that is climate smart per se. Whether or not a particular practice or production system is climate smart depends upon the particular local climatic, biophysical, socio-economic and development context, which determines how far a particular practice or system can deliver on productivity increase, resilience and mitigation benefits. For Africa to reap the potential benefits CSA, concrete actions must be taken to: enhance the evidence base to underpin strategic choices, promote and facilitate wider adoption by farmers of appropriate technologies; develop institutional arrangements to support, apply and scale-out CSA from the farm level to the agricultural landscape level; manage tradeoffs in perspectives of farmers and policymakers; strengthen technical, analytical and implementation capacities; ensure policy frameworks and public investments are supportive of CSA; develop and implement effective risk-sharing schemes

Human rights or security?:Positions on asylum in European Parliament speeches

This study examines speeches in the European Parliament relating to asylum. Conceptually, it tests hypotheses concerning the relation between national parties and Members of European Parliament. The computer-based content analysis method Wordfish is used to examine 876 speeches from 2004 to 2014, scaling Members of European Parliament along a unidimensional policy space. Debates on asylum predominantly concern positions for or against European Union security measures. Surprisingly, national party preferences for European Union integration were not the dominant factor. The strongest predictors of Members of European Parliament's positions are their national parties’ general ‘right-left’ preferences, and duration of European Union membership. Generally, Members of European Parliament from Central and Eastern Europe and the European People's Party take up pro-security stances. Wordfish was effective and valid, confirming the relevance of automated content analysis for studying the European Union.</jats:p