What is climate-smart agriculture?

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is an approach for transforming agriculture under the new realities of climate change.  The most commonly used definition is “agriculture that sustainably increases productivity, enhances resilience (adaptation), reduces/removes GHGs (mitigation) where possible, and enhances achievement of national food security and development goals”.  Climate-smart agriculture is a subset of sustainable agriculture, by which we mean that all the practices that deliver productivity, resilience or mitigation in relation to climate would also be practices included in most elaborations of sustainable agriculture. This boils down to three essential features:

  1. an explicit focus on climate change;
  2. the search for synergies and negotiation of trade-offs in the pursuit of productivity, adaptation and mitigation outcomes in a broader landscape or system perspective; and
  3. the availability of new funding opportunities for agricultural development.

A variety of stakeholders from local to national and international levels who identify agricultural strategies suitable to their local conditions engage in climate-smart agriculture.  Climate-smart agriculture can be used among many commodities, including coffee.  CSA allows for not just farmers or co-ops to engage but also buyers, producers and retailers.

This video produced by the World Bank shows a coffee farmer in Uganda implementing climate-smart agriculture.

World Bank (2013).Brewing Prosperity in Uganda: Coffee Farmers Turn to Climate-Smart Agriculture.

Welcome to
Climate Smart Coffee

Increasingly, coffee companies recognize the need to plan for and act on climate change to mitigate supply, reputation and quality risk and realize their sustainability targets. This website is designed to guide medium and large companies, who buy from and support smallholder coffee value chains, to identify relevant areas of engagement and investment in smallholder adaptation to climate change.

Building on knowledge from platforms like coffee&climate, Global Coffee Platform, Specialty Coffee Association, and Conservation International’s Sustainable Coffee Challenge, climate smart coffee highlights research work completed by the USAID Feed the Future Alliance for Resilient Coffee, CCAFS Mainstreaming Climate Smart Value Chains initiative and other key partners.

For complementary information on climate-smart agriculture (CSA), please visit the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) CSA Guide which provides the basics of CSA across crops and geographies, and for companies working specifically with cocoa, please visit our sister site Climate Smart Cocoa, developed by CIAT and Rainforest Alliance/Utz.

Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security

Climate-Smart Agriculture Basics

Company Engagement in Climate-Smart Agriculture

Take Action

Increasingly, companies recognize the need to plan for climate change to mitigate risk and realize commitments to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or other sustainability targets. Coffee companies in particular ultimately seek to translate climate risk intelligence into practical, operational strategies to build supply chain resilience. Diagnostic and decision-making tools are being created and accessible to users on this website as well as the toolbox.coffeeandclimate.org

Smallholder coffee sourcing entails working with many, diverse farming communities around the globe, each with its own agricultural practices, cultural context, and risk exposure. Depending on the role the coffee company plays in the supply chain, they may lack fine-grain visibility into smallholder performance, or they may seek guidance on how to translate fine-grain data on climate risk and smallholder performance into targeted action plans across their sourcing geographies.

To take action, coffee companies may follow a simple process laid out in the Introduction to Assessing Climate Resilience in Smallholder Supply Chains. This guide, created by the Sustainable Food Lab and Root Capital, breaks down the complex concept of resilience into manageable themes following a five-step process that coffee companies can follow (laid out below), including links to tools and resources offered by leaders in the field. The initiative for coffee & climate toolbox also contains actionable tools by a number of expert research organizations to address these steps.

Take Action

About

About

This website was developed by the Sustainable Food Lab and CIAT.  Thank you to the many organizations who provided tools and resources to the climate smart coffee website.  Photos for this website were provided by CIAT, the Sustainable Food Lab and World Coffee Research.

Our Research Partners

Led by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) is a collaboration among all 15 CGIAR Research Centers, including IITA.  With help from the Rainforest Alliance, Root Capital and the Sustainable Food Lab, provide the evidence-based science behind climate smart coffee.  To learn more about individual contributes read below.