PROTOCOL: Interventions promoting resilience through climate-smart agricultural practices for women farmers: A systematic review

This is the protocol for a Campbell systematic review. The objectives are as follows: the primary objective of this review is to synthesise evidence of the effectiveness of interventions to promote climate‐smart agriculture to enhance agricultural outcomes and resilience of women farmers in low‐and‐middle‐income countries (research question 1). The secondary objective is to examine evidence along the causal pathway from access to interventions to promote climate‐smart agriculture to empowering women so that they can use climate‐smart technology. And such outcomes include knowledge sharing, agency improvement, resource access and decision‐making (research question 2)

Evidence gap map on impacts of Socio-Technical Innovation Bundles (STIBs) on women’s empowerment and resilience. CGIAR Initiative on Gender Equality (HER+)

A combination of factors, including policies, technological advancements in response to climate change and social needs, and changes in market demand, have triggered considerable agricultural transformations in recent decades (Timmer, 1988; Viswanathan et al., 2012; Thanh et al., 2021). Yet, technological innovations alone do not necessarily make agricultural transformations sustainable and inclusive over time. Several actors are now focusing on introducing bundled interventions combining technical and/or technological innovations with social innovations. Their aim is to apply a multi-pronged approach to agricultural transformation that simultaneously allows technological advancements, with increased adoption of new methods and tools, and alleviates barriers in access to inputs and credits. Gwynne and Ortiz (1997) provide a clear example from Chile, proving how institutional changes in land ownership, expansion of productive investments, and provision of financial inputs to farmers succeeded in promoting agricultural development, especially increasing agricultural output and labour productivity, among others. Also, Joshi and Joshi (2019) reckon the importance of policies in Nepal and their significance in combination with technology adoption to avoid negative impacts on food production and access and availability of water and energy. Although these bundled interventions target all farmers in principle, women farmers are often disadvantaged, as the bundle configuration does not consider their preferences, capacities and/or capabilities. This “fits all” approach is particularly problematic as women constitute about half of the agricultural labour force, and if they face greater difficulties in accessing these bundles, and reaping the benefits derived from them, then these bundles fail to empower half of the target population. With the intention to bridge the existing gender gaps, the socio-technical innovation bundles or STIBs need to be gender-responsive and align with women’s preferences, attitudes, and capacities. In order to understand which configurations of STIBs can be most beneficial for women, existing evidence related to STIB interventions and their impact on women’s resilience and empowerment needs to be examined. Therefore, this evidence gap map reviews the existing literature on the effect of different STIBs and provides evidence on how and whether these bundles empower women and enhance their resilience. This evidence gap map will guide and inform decision-making about the design and implementation of STIBs in different contexts and how enabling factors can improve or modify their performanc

The N-Terminal Domain of the Drosophila Retinoblastoma Protein Rbf1 Interacts with ORC and Associates with Chromatin in an E2F Independent Manner

The retinoblastoma (Rb) tumor suppressor protein can function as a DNA replication inhibitor as well as a transcription factor. Regulation of DNA replication may occur through interaction of Rb with the origin recognition complex (ORC).We characterized the interaction of Drosophila Rb, Rbf1, with ORC. Using expression of proteins in Drosophila S2 cells, we found that an N-terminal Rbf1 fragment (amino acids 1-345) is sufficient for Rbf1 association with ORC but does not bind to dE2F1. We also found that the C-terminal half of Rbf1 (amino acids 345-845) interacts with ORC. We observed that the amino-terminal domain of Rbf1 localizes to chromatin in vivo and associates with chromosomal regions implicated in replication initiation, including colocalization with Orc2 and acetylated histone H4.Our results suggest that Rbf1 can associate with ORC and chromatin through domains independent of the E2F binding site. We infer that Rbf1 may play a role in regulating replication directly through its association with ORC and/or chromatin factors other than E2F. Our data suggest an important role for retinoblastoma family proteins in cell proliferation and tumor suppression through interaction with the replication initiation machinery

Gender and Climate Smart Agriculture: Co-creating a Learning Agenda

What is a Learning Agenda? A set of questions, planned activities and products that facilitate learning and decision making within an organization or project/programme around a specific theme. A coordination tool for identifying knowledge gaps and answers a range of priority questions within a given budget and timeframes

Six practical steps to support women farmers to drive climate resilience

Women and girls are burdened with a disproportionate share of the negative impacts of climate change, but they can also play key roles in climate change adaptation if solutions are designed to work for them. Women and men are affected by climate change impacts in different ways and have different opportunities and abilities to respond. Climate change adaptation and mitigation actions, policies and investments must take such differences into account to be successful. A climate change solution that does not work for women is not a climate change solution. In advance of COP27, we have identified six practical steps, based on past research from CGIAR and beyond, that governments, development partners and private sector investors must take to support women farmers to respond to climate change and drive resilience for everyone

A learning agenda on gender-responsive climate-smart agriculture

A new learning agenda can point out learning gaps and set research priorities for organizations working to ensure that women benefit equally from climate-smart agriculture

Mapping Climate-Agriculture-Gender Inequity Hotspots to Build Resilience

In many cases, women are more vulnerable to adverse climate change impacts, due to their limited asset ownership, such as land, as well as more reduced access to capital, labor and agricultural inputs. Women also have more limited access to information, which, in turn, means lower awareness and knowledge of climate risks and strategies to manage them. Social norms and gender roles in many countries limit women’s participation in strategic decision-making in their households and communities, making them less able to participate in and affect group activities, access extension services or adopt new practices and technologies. Overall, their capacity to respond to climate stress is lower. However, this generic knowledge of women’s vulnerabilities to adverse climate change effects limits policy action. More granular knowledge on women’s involvement in agriculture and on how their involvement is affected by climate stresses is needed to support adaptation responses. To this end, we studied 87 low- to middle-income countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to understand different climate change risks as well as impacts on women engaged in agriculture. We defined climate-agriculture-gender inequity hotspots as areas where large numbers of women participate in agriculture and food production and where extreme climate hazards can trigger crop failure, pest and disease outbreaks, and degradation of land and water resources

Where women in agri-food systems are at highest climate risk: A methodology for mapping climate-agriculture-gender inequality hotspots

Climate change poses a greater threat for more exposed and vulnerable countries, communities and social groups. People whose livelihood depends on the agriculture and food sector, especially in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs), face significant risk. In contexts with gendered roles in agri-food systems or where structural constraints to gender equality underlie unequal access to resources and services and constrain women's agency, local climate hazards and stressors, such as droughts, floods, or shortened crop-growing seasons, tend to negatively affect women more than men and women's adaptive capacities tend to be more restrained than men's . Transformation towards just and sustainable agri-food systems in the face of climate change will not only depend on reducing but also on averting aggravated gender inequality in agri-food systems. In this paper, we developed and applied an accessible and versatile methodology to identify and map localities where climate change poses high risk especially for women in agri-food systems because of gendered exposure and vulnerability. We label these localities climate-agriculture-gender inequality hotspots. Applying our methodology to LMICs reveals that the countries at highest risk are majorly situated in Africa and Asia. Applying our methodology for agricultural activity-specific hotspot subnational areas to four focus countries, Mali, Zambia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, for instance, identifies a cluster of districts in Dhaka and Mymensingh divisions in Bangladesh as a hotspot for rice. The relevance and urgency of identifying localities where climate change hits agri-food systems hardest and is likely to negatively affect population groups or sectors that are particularly vulnerable is increasingly acknowledged in the literature and, in the spirit of leaving no one behind, in climate and development policy arenas. Hotspot maps can guide the allocation of scarce resources to most at-risk populations. The climate-agriculture-gender inequality hotspot maps show where women involved in agri-food systems are at high climate risk while signaling that reducing this risk requires addressing the structural barriers to gender equality