Interviews

CCAFS recommendations on knowledge and information systems

Molly Jahn

CCAFS Commissioner talks about how the Commission's recommendations are mobilising action in a wide array of communities

Online/Madison, Wisconsin, 14 Feb 2013. Molly Jahn, professor in the Laboratory of Genetics and Department of Agronomy at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, discusses the importance of knowledge systems for sustainable agriculture and development. She provides many examples where the seven recommendations by the commission instituted by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) have led to new partnerships and actions - such as the fields of waste reduction or information systems.

//  Knowledge systems for sustainability

Platform secretariat: Molly, you are working on the initiative "Knowledge Systems for Sustainable Land Management". Can you explain what that is and what donors should know about it?

Molly Jahn: We understand that donors and many others are focused on words like sustainable development. We understand that these opportunities to actually improve conditions on the ground for human beings and the natural resource base - the environment they depend on - is probably the most important thing we're going to do in this century. Our ability to track the conditions of people and their resource base through time is relatively unsophisticated.

Watch. Knowledge systems for sustainability is an international collaborative, made up of a number of major partners who have an interest in this and the capabilities to address these challenges - knowing better what kind of real benefits investments that are made in development actually create. It's a broad collaborative and unusual in the sense that governments and government entities - like research organisations that connect to governments - are involved but also development organisations and projects. They understand that every intervention we make in a development mode is an experiment to some degree.

We are a group of major players who are committed to receiving the information from the experiments we do in development in a more systematic way, and in leveraging very large investments made in global monitoring and analytics into development challenges towards food security for all within a long-term safe space for the planet.

//  Donors' involvement in knowledge systems

Secretariat: Don't you think donors are under pressure to roll out and monitoring is a bit beside the point? Watch.

M.J.: We are interacting with a number of donors who are interested in modern approaches to project monitoring and evaluation. The old model of a post-hoc assessment is very insufficient. Frequently, a post-hoc assessment only covered one aspect: Did we raise the yield of the crop? Without understanding, did those increases in yields leave people better off? We assume they did but that data is complicated.

What we are finding is donors who also understand the need to create learning systems within projects, as they are unfolding. Modern project monitoring and evaluation approaches create a possible platform for adaptive management of the project and eventually of the activities on the ground. Far from being something that's done from the outside in, we have partners that are interested in leveraging what they do already to be accountable and to assure that their projects are managed properly towards larger, longer-term, more sustained beneficial impacts connected to adaptive management and even adaptive governance.

//  Private sector involvement in knowledge systems

Secretariat: Where does the private sector factor in all this?

M.J.: Let me go back a bit to the recommendations set out by the commission. They could, we believe, move food systems towards better outcomes for human beings and for the planet - including reduced greenhouse gas emissions. One of those recommendations - number seven - focused on integrated information systems in human and environmental dimensions. This recommendation is foundational for everything else we're concerned about.

So, when you think about better tracking of conditions on the ground in real time and better abilities to navigate across different dimensions: What are the public health conditions that people on the ground experience? What is the condition of the natural resources upon which their livelihoods depend? How are yields moving over time? How are extreme weather events affecting yields? Those are the kind of questions that this network has come together to explore.

//  Example of private sector involvement__ Weather information

Watch. Any scan on the history of innovation shows that there is typically an opening that occurs with public investments but that to scale those benefits, that opportunity transitions to benefits for the private sector. You can think about the transition of weather information: From a research mode in the first half of the 20th century to a multi-billion dollar industry with many different kinds of beneficial impacts - from aviation to investment - as we mainstreamed the provision of weather information from the public sector activities to the private sector.

Now, there is still a large private sector investment in something like weather and there are many different ways in which the private sector can leverage those public sector investments towards value in a for-profit mode. So, think about this pipeline, both in terms of the starting technologies and then its delivery to impact. And think also of this spread of that capability across the globe from developed country contact to developing country contact. You can understand what types of opportunities it is that our network intends to streamline in a way.

Weather information is an incredibly important kind of information for every agricultural producer on the planet: For a smallholder in a very vulnerable, marginalised part of the world or a very large-scale farmer in a very well-endowed setting. Weather really matters. Weather's changing: We're experiencing extreme events in a really unprecedented way. Even the experiences of the most sophisticated agricultural producer may not be a guide to the conditions that producer is experiencing now.

We are working to mobilise individual holders of capacity, whether in the public or private sector, towards opportunities like that. Of course, in that opportunity is a challenge. We know that weather patterns are changing. We know we are seeing increased intensity and frequency of extreme events. Those are threats everywhere on earth. To some extent, we can mitigate those threats but those are long-term, incremental actions.

There are urgent opportunities from the private sector connected to adaptation. It's really that blend of opportunities and that blend of partners that we're intending to support.

//  CCAFS recommendations__ Beginning, not end of stepping into action

Secretariat: What's the outcome of the monitoring of the pick-up of the recommendations?

M.J.: We structured our whole engagement with this commission to maximise the possibility that these seven recommendations, bundled as a portfolio of action, would pick up and go. One more report on the shelf we did not need.

Watch. What has been very exciting, is that while that launch of the commission recommendations was the wrap-up of one part of the process, it was very intentionally the beginning of another. That really was the mobilisation of a number of global communities into action around each of those recommendations.

The recommendations understand the obvious truth: That our food systems are systems. That there are series of actions that relate to intensified and improved productivity, reduced waste, the need to reshape demand from agriculture towards health and improved environmental outcomes and the need to know what we're doing in something like real time. In a nutshell, that's what our recommendations were as well as to realise that increased investments is essential. It's not just the typical kinds of development investment but increased investment in the opportunities which do scale also to the private sector. We have to realise that the world's most vulnerable people not automatically benefit from any of these actions. We have to remember that today people are dying and today people are threatened. Whatever set of actions we undertake, we have to make sure that we address that very vulnerable population's need today.

//  Example of pick-up__ Waste reduction

What has happened since is very exciting, I think. Each recommendation has catalysed a community and yet these communities are moving forward together. Think about the issue of waste in food systems. It's an issue everywhere on earth: It's an issue in the developing world, both post-harvest and pre-harvest as well as post-farm gate into retail, and also a huge issue in the developed world. What I've seen since our recommendation on waste has come forward, is a clear recognition that we really can't talk about   food systems in the future without thinking about waste.

//  Example of pick-up__ Intensified productivity

Likewise, I've seen the recommendations galvanise the recognition of the linkages to intensified productivity - whether it's in the developed or the developing world context.

//  Example of pick-up__ Information systems

Finally, the need for integrated, modern information systems: They're related to decision-making. Those decisions may be the smallest-scale decisions made by smallholders in the developing world or they may be large-scale policy decisions. Ultimately, those decisions aggregate into the trajectory of our societies in a globally closed system to determine the future we will receive.

We're excited that the launch of the recommendations has been a beginning of a series of coordinated actions that are working in catalytic ways towards new types of partnerships and communities and yet they're occurring in relationship to each other.

What role can donors play in fulfilling @cgiarclimate recommendations? Read proposed actions by #CCAFS commission: bit.ly/11GoSjR

— Donor Platform (@donorplatform) 13. Februar 2013

//  Addressing a perceived vagueness of the CCAFS recommendation

Secretariat: What do you say to claims that the recommendations are too vague? Should donors rather be told what not to do?

M.J.: There are already billions of dollars being invested in this phase. Of course, many of the donors or multilateral organisations are overseeing that investment.

Watch. Now, since March 2012, when this bundle of recommendations was announced, it's not been about whether we will do it - we are doing it. We are taking action under these recommendations. The recommendations on information systems or intensified productivity within planetary boundaries are good examples of where donors are taking existing investments, each one of which has a value, and coming together in new kinds of partnerships: For example, across the public-private boundary, across government, beyond development organisations. They recognise clear alignment - sometimes even overlap - of action.

I'll give you an example: I've worked in development and food security my whole career and have had a set of partners that have supported my work in development. In the last year, for the first time in my career, I have been able to enlist the active collaboration of organisations that ordinarily would not be focusing in development. These are advanced research providers, who are very interested in understanding the limits of our planet for productivity. Yet, they have not ever understood the kind of development and food security focus that I have worked on as extremely relevant to their work, for example with very sophisticated earth observation systems or tracking human dimensions across space and time.

We are now bringing in these types of capabilities in a way that I have never seen before towards development challenges.

//  Example__ Crises as a catalyst for change

Of course, some of our crises are helping. In my country, the US, for example, the food price spikes that led to political instability in many parts of the world, heightened the awareness of critical linkages between food security in the developing world and lots of other kinds of security in my country. So, far from being vague, these recommendations give us space to convene major players with major capabilities that have never come together before - across national boundaries, across scientific disciplinary boundaries - and bringing those capabilities into development in new ways. It puts at my disposal billions of dollars in investment that weren't harnessed before in my community.

Another example: This year, we are seeing organised interest on the part of the private sector in where emerging market that really sustainable development might occur. We're ready for those conversations, thanks to the recommendations.

//  Downloads

Commission final report__ PDF

Report summary__ PDF

//  Sources

CCAFS

CCAFS Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change

Interview with CCAFS Commissioner Tekalign Mamo

CCAFS recommendations__ Roles for donors

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The interview was conducted by Pascal Corbé of the Platform secretariat.

Climate finance for smallholders to increase resilience

Elwyn Grainger-Jones

Director of IFAD's Environment and Climate Division discussing climate-smart agriculture and the Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme (ASAP)

Online/Rome, 18 Dec 2012. To address the devastating effects that climate change can have on smallholder farmers, multiple donors hve come together to increase these farmers' resilience to climate change: The Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme (ASAP) aims to scale-up successful "multiple-benefit" approaches and improve the capacity of at least eight million farmers.

The two main reasons for focusing on small-holders is that they are hit hardest by climate change and that supporting smallholder farmers could also reduce emissions, Elywn Grainger-Jones said.

The Director of the Environment and Climate Division at IFAD objected the notion that climate-smart agriculture and specifically ASAP were “old wine in new bottles”, a mere rebranding exercise. He conceded that 80 per cent of the tools and techniques climate-smart agriculture uses were well-known and proven – but “they were often used without a consciousness around climate change”. These included agro-forestry, land restoration techniques or biogas.

20 per cent of what climate-smart agriculture uses were new tools, e.g. climate forecasting, detailed vulnerability assessments, risk management tools or longer-term focus to projects, he said in the interview. These new tools change the way of understanding and doing projects.

Grainger-Jones also drew attention to the highly political and institutionalised context of some of the climate change discussions. This setting contributes to the policy framework lagging behind in addressing negative effects smallholders have on climate change such as land degradation or deforestation. A focus on better communication could improve this situation.

//  Mixed results at UNFCCC conference in Doha

Platform secretariat: What is your take on the UN climate change negotiations from Doha? Could small-holder agriculture have been included in a better way there? Watch.

Elwyn Grainger-Jones: It’s really hard to know how to respond to that question as a professional working on these issues. I’m really torn between talking up the process, because the process is quite weak and needs that kind of positive talk to keep people focused, to keep energy, to keep the belief that this system can somehow deliver. I’m torn between that and the science of this, which is that we are moving woefully slowly. There doesn’t seem to be enough political will in the system right now to generate the kind of action that’s needed.

It's either the glass half-full or the glass half-empty. The glass half-full is that the process continues, there wasn’t a breakdown in the talks, there were some agreements. For example, the Kyoto Protocol continues to survive in a form, there were some agreements on how the negotiation process will proceed.

The glass half-empty is that we’ve got very little time left now to start peaking our emissions and start decreasing them. We're on the wrong trajectory and it doesn’t feel like there’s enough political will.

If you ask me how do I feel about this conference on the perspective of smallholder farmers: The world is woefully, woefully short of what kind of action is needed at the international level to create a framework to avoid dangerous climate change. It's smallholder farmers who, unfortunately, are on the front line of that. They weren’t in the conference, they weren’t in the room, but their spirits were there. It’s going to be them that’s going to be - it is them already who are - hit particularly hard with their reliance on natural resources.

//  About ASAP

Secretariat: Elwyn, you’re also in charge of IFAD’s agriculture Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme (ASAP). How does that link to Doha and what about climate finance? Watch.

E.G.: Part of the glass half-full story, as I was just saying to you, is that there is quite a lot of encouraging action going on on the ground, which is in many cases in stark contrast to a certain politics of mistrust and lack of action in the international negotiation process. What we are finding at IFAD is that there is a tremendous research activity and demand from the communities we’re working with to really think through what climate change means for them.

What IFAD has done is set up a really ambitious new programme, the Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme (ASAP). In a nutshell, this is a new window - as part of our core replenishment process - where governments and donor countries provided fast-track climate finance directly into IFAD for us to get to smallholder farmers. The sense that we have is that smallholder farmers are not getting much of this climate finance. If we can make them big recipients, we can make a case with a really strong monitoring and evaluation system and a strong evidence base, that smallholder farmers should be really significant recipients of climate finance, because of two reasons.

//  Why smallholders need to be included in climate change discussions

Watch. First, they’re on the frontline of climate change, so they’re really important people to help manage climate impact. They are affected directly by the storms, droughts, floods, extremely hot or extremely cold days.

Secondly, if we do things the right way with them, a lot of the adaptation actions that we will be supporting smallholder farmers to do also are pretty good at reducing emissions.

So, one way or another, these 500 million smallholder farms, feeding a third of humanity, just simply have got to be part of the climate story. You asked how it related to Doha: Basically, what this programme is doing is taking fast-track climate finance, demonstrating how getting that to smallholder farmers is a really good thing to do and then we hope to make the case to the green climate funds and other future funding sources, that we should not overlook smallholder farmers. That’s really the link to Doha.

//  Five donors participate in ASAP

Watch. Just in terms of the programme itself, we have five donors and we’re extremely grateful for their support. We have contributions from the UK, Canada, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands’ contribution is being finalised. We have about $250 million in firm pledges and an additional $80 million as a conditional pledge from the UK. That’s big enough to co-finance about a third of our future programme. That’s a very abrupt and really quite striking programme of institutional change within IFAD to tool up, to make sure that at least a third of our programmes are very much best practice what is climate smart agriculture.

//  Example project from Mozambique

Secretariat: How does the programme progress so far? Watch.

E.G.: The programme just started now. We had the finalised contributions from various donors over the last few weeks, actually. We’ve already made one contribution to Mozambique: There was a value chain project at about $45 million. We added $5 million from ASAP through grant finance because ASAP is a grant finance instrument. This was to really help that project in Mozambique think through, how to make a climate smart value chain project. That's already gone to our board and that will be starting to disburse very soon.

//  Other projects around the world

Watch. We’re very quickly designing projects in a whole bunch of other countries. We’ve started design work in Bolivia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Mali, Vietnam, Yemen and we’re about to start design work in Bangledesh, Djibouti, Liberia and Nigeria. All with the intention of developing on average $10 million grants to these countries and having those grants approved by our board within the next year. We hope to approve about ten to twelve projects in the next year, worth about $116M in total, co-financing about $350 million of IFAD operations. The bottom line is: We aim to very rapidly mobilise in this programme. There’s not a programme this big that’s focusing on smallholder farmers and climate change adaption. But there are a lot of programmes on climate change generally which involve lots of projects.

What’s important to us in IFAD is that this is much more than the sum of its parts. There is quite an intensive monitoring and evaluation attached to this, all with the view to make the case that this works. And what is "this"? What is building climate resilience for smallholder farmers? We aim to describe it, we aim to measure it and we aim to communicate it. And that’s extremely important to us to do that quite quickly, so that, if as anticipated, more of future north-south or east-west public finance transfers, such as aid, are anchored around climate change, that this important community of smallholders isn’t overlooked as they so often are. Because they’re not the elites, they’re not the power brokers, they’re not the ones most often with big influence in governments. So, we realy want them to be major recipients and essentially there at the finance table.

//  Critical mass needed for adaptation programmes

Secretariat: So you say that size does matter in terms of climate-related agriculture approaches. Watch.

E.G.: I think it’s important - at least institutionally - to have a critical mass. If this programme in IFAD had maybe $30-40 million, we’d have been able to do a bunch of smaller projects, but it’s actually about a third of our last replenishment. That’s big enough to generate the kind of internal incentives and recognition of this issue that was needed to help IFAD move even more rapidly in the direction of being a genuinely climate-smart organisation. And believe you me, this is a challenge task in any development organisation. Climate change is not necessarily an intuitive issue. There is still some confusion out there amongst partners and even some of us here at IFAD about what’s really different about climate-smart agriculture. Is this simply a relabeling of what we always did? Is this old wine in a new bottle?

//  Climate change discussions in agriculture__ Old wine in new bottles?

Secretariat: You mentioned already that there’s a number of donors in the ASAP program. Do you see any particular utility in involving the Platform, going to the next Platform Annual General Assembly? Watch.

E.G.: I’ve spoken to a lot of country programme managers in IFAD, partners in agriculture and development organisations and my feeling is that we need to do something to just clarify this issue. I am really struck by how many good agriculturalists will come to me and say: 'Isn’t this what we always did? Isn’t this a rebranding exercise, because this is where the money is coming from now?' I think we’ve seriously got to do something to develop a conceptual framework for the issue of climate change and agriculture that makes sense to agriculturalists, that makes sense within the sector.

Using the old wine in new bottles analogy I made, the answer I tend to give is that it is maybe 80 per cent old wine in new bottles. It is using tools and techniques that we’ve developed over many years such as agro-forestry, land restoration techniques, biogas. There are all these techniques - maybe 30, 40, 50, hundreds of such techniques - but the thing was, they were often used without a consciousness around climate change.

All we’re doing is adding a new grape variety that’s maybe 20 per cent of that new bottle - and that 20 per cent new grape variety is things like climate forecasting, much more detailed vulnerability assessments, a much great emphasis on risk management and risk management tools, a much longer-term focus to the project or policy design so that we’re thinking within time scales of 20 years, so you can have a trend where actually average temperature increases effect the kind of investment decisions you would make, rather than the more typical short term. We’re not using the past as a guide to the future, we’re using estimates of what will happen in the future. If you add that 20 per cent, it changes the taste of the whole bottle, because the way in which you’d use all these tools that we’ve developed in the past may be quite different. You would locate your water buffers in different places, you'd locate your small scale irrigation sites, your water entrapment sites, in a quite different way.

//  Climate-smart agriculture__ Example from Vietnam

Watch. Vietnam is a really fascinating example here. We’re developing, using ASAP support, a project with the Vietnamese authorities in the Mekong Delta. Now, the Mekong Delta is going to be hit very hard by climate change. It’s very important to Vietnam’s production systems: It’s about half of its agricultural production overall and 80 per cent of its rice exports. Now, sea level is going to hit it, it’s already inundating coasts, and one meter will inundate about three quarters of the arable land in the delta. The saline is going to limit rice production. The temperature increases are meaning that the river flow is decreasing, so water is backing up inland and affecting the salinity of inland waterways. The temperature increases are also affecting rice production, during the flowering period, an extremely sensitive period for rice. The droughts are longer and there are longer and hotter summer periods. As much as 90 per cent of the delta will be subject to flooding.

Why am I saying all this? Because a climate sensitive and aware approach to development in the delta will not just look at the seed varieties, which is an unfortunately familiar way of thinking about climate smart agriculture, that we can somehow maintain current systems exactly as they are, but with better technologies, they will enable those systems to survive. In the delta, that would involve finding a kind of super seed of rice which instead of withstanding a few days underwater, will withstand two weeks underwater. They’ll be far more saline resistant to withstand higher and deep temperatures, they’ll be more drought-resistant, and can you believe it, after all this, we’ll also have better yields for people.

Well, we can’t just rely on that. We’ve got to work on the seed varieties, but we’ve also got to try to work on diversification of these systems and look at the whole ecosystem in the delta and think about income and land use diversification, we’re not just thinking about rice or shrimp/rice mix or agriculture in highly saline areas, a much more profound approach to management that goes beyond traditional water groups. We build adaptive capacity.

It’s a fairly long way of saying that when you actually mix that 20 per cent with the 80 per cent you’re looking at very significant farming system changes, in addition to using technology to make the current system or new system work better. That makes climate change, climate-smart agriculture, actually quite a challenging issue, because it goes well beyond essentially layering a few things onto our current system of farming. It really challenges fundamental - even ideological - approaches to farming. It’s in many ways quite challenging to the traditional green revolution approach to farming, which can be pretty cookie-cutter and focused on input-intensive way of managing and a not particularly diverse way of managing landscapes.

//  Communicating climate-smart agriculture

Secretariat: So do projects have a pretty strong communications component, if you talk about ideology and behaviour change? Watch.

E.G.: Let's not forget that because of a lack of support, investment and sometimes education, smallholders are often a significant driver of land degradation and deforestation. There are some good questions to be asked with a growing body of evidence, why it is that the policy framework tends to lag a little bit behind that. We are seeing quite a significant shift in mindsets around what is agriculture, but that’s still not as widespread as you’d think it would be.

What’s the right solution there? Often, I’ve been in meetings where there’s a room full of technical experts discussing how we can change mindsets, change the paradigm, can turn climate change and agriculture from being sort of tack-on issues to the main business of feeding the world to really core issues. We go beyond lip service to these issues in some quarters. What you need in the room are communication experts and the kind of skills that are involved in political campaigning. But remember that many of those involved in this issue are UN organisations and there are limits which we must respect. In a sense, our role is to develop the technical understanding of the issues and to be able to share those technical understandings of the issues.

//  What the Platform can do to advance climate-smart agriculture

Watch. I think there’s a role that the Global Donor Platform can play, because you’re bringing together many of those that are very much at the centre of at least the donor community’s engagement in agriculture. There’s still a lot we can do to bridge a disconnect between the agriculture, the environment and the climate stories. I think that donors are more and more putting money into climate-smart agriculture as it's often described. There’s a lot we can do to coordinate those efforts to try and develop a common understanding of the issues so that there is a more coordinated approach.

At the moment, it feels a little scattered, a little disjointed. I would like to see much closer cooperation between agencies and donors, to be able to take this forward. Again, all the efforts add up to more than the sum of the parts. I’m really hoping that at the Annual General Assembly in January, the session on climate change, which will be myself, Gordon Conway and some others, will have a very active and informal discussion in the room. We can think a lot more about how we can try and rejuvenate the network that was active in the past and still do some activity around climate change, and think about what it means in terms of the core understanding of agriculture, too.

//  Downloads

ASAP brochure__ PDF

ASAP programme description__ PDF

Climate-smart smallholder agriculture: What's different?__ PDF

//  Sources

ASAP at IFAD

First ASAP project under implementation in Mozambique

Platform Annual General Assembly (AGA)

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Use the comment function on this website or send your feedback to (This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) . We will do our best to publish your response here, but may edit it for reasons of clarity and space.

The interview was conducted by Pascal Corbé of the Platform secretariat.