Resource information
This Topic Guide addresses the threat that climate change poses to food security and poverty reduction achievements. The peer-reviewed guide explains how programming around climate-smart agriculture can help adapt and build resilience to climate change – at the same time stimulating economic growth and poverty reduction in the agricultural sector.
The main message from this Topic Guide is that climate change is already affecting food security and agricultural growth under all types of agriculture, and is expected to continue to have an increasingly serious impact on smallholders and large scale agriculture.
A well-considered approach that tackles both technical and structural issues in agriculture is essential, and can create a prosperous climate-resilient agricultural sector that enables inclusive growth.
Well-tailored packages of interventions can support dynamic farmers to take advantage of new markets and opportunities. Other interventions can support those whose poverty constrains them significantly. But in many countries, significant structural issues constrain smallholder agriculture and need to be resolved for agriculture to prosper. These include a complex range of context-specific issues such as favourable national policies, better access to knowledge, credit and investment for women and the poor or marginalised.
They also include ‘hard’ physical or technological issues of adequate infrastructure, access to farm inputs, improved technologies and markets. Within a world affected by climate change, it becomes ever more important that current science and early warning information are gathered and shared faster and better with
