Integrating Climate-Smart Agriculture with Poverty Reduction and Food Security Goals

Food systems lie at the nexus of the world’s climate change adaptation, poverty reduction, and food and nutrition security goals. A poorly functioning or environmentally unsustainable food system can have severe negative consequences for all three factors, particularly for the poor populations who rely on agri-food systems for their livelihoods. In the OECD’s 2024 Development Co-operation Report, researchers in Chapter 21 examine how climate-smart agriculture technologies and practices can be better integrated to help bridge the gap between climate, poverty, and food security

Chapter 21, “Climate smart agriculture and food systems that reduce poverty and hunger”, looks at lessons learned from climate-smart agricultural practices implemented in India, Tajikistan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, and Myanmar. In low-income and middle-income countries such as these, agri-food systems account for a large share of both livelihoods and national GDP. In addition, poor communities in these and other countries spend a large percentage of their income on food and are 15 times more likely to be affected by climate-related extreme weather events like droughts and floods than non-poor populations. Globally, agriculture and food systems make up around 30 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions and are a major driver of such negative climate effects on both the global and the local levels.

With so much riding on agri-food systems, transforming these systems to better support climate, poverty, and food security goals, like those encompassed in the SDGs, needs to be a priority for policymakers and development practitioners.

The chapter’s authors argue that such transformation can be best accomplished by looking at the three overarching goals comprehensively rather than as separate sectoral silos. A more holistic approach will allow for the more effective design of tailored interventions that reduce the risks posed by extreme weather events, support income generation among poor communities in the face of climate-related shocks, and ensure access to safe, nutritious, and diverse foods during emergency situations.

Countries’ nationally determined contributions (NDCs)—national commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as part of climate change mitigation goals set forth by the Paris Agreement— provide one pathway for the development of such integration. By building food system transformation action plans into their NDCs, the authors posit, countries can ensure their climate policies appropriately consider and incorporate food and nutrition security and finance goals. In Tajikistan, coupling improved farm-level livestock management practices with manure management practices to more effectively reduce methane production in the livestock sector has been shown to hold potential for both reducing environmental impacts and helping rural communities build resilience for managing food security and weather-related shocks.

Such multi-sectoral, multi-stakeholder action also requires new financing models that integrate climate, poverty, and food security outcomes. This will mean commitment and coordination by governments, private sector actors, development partners, and local and international NGOs to identify areas where resources can be optimized to achieve collective climate, food security, and poverty goals.

Improved coordination is also needed to better align donor and government systems when it comes to implementation of interventions related to climate action and poverty and food security goals, the authors point out. The work on methane reduction in Tajikistan provides an example of such coordination. These efforts began with regular multi-sectoral consultations among government and development partner actors to develop a framework to address climate, poverty, and food security priorities more cohesively; this framework ultimately led to the country joining the Global Methane Pledge and establishing the aforementioned intervention to jointly address methane emissions and increase resilience in the livestock sector.

Much remains to be done to integrate climate smart agriculture with poverty reduction and food security efforts, at both the national and the global level. As more countries document successful interventions and programs, research is needed into how these success stories can be scaled up and transferred to other local and national contexts.

Sara Gustafson is a freelance communications consultant.