IFAD social reporting blog

• Young women and men should be included in the whole project circle from design to implementation.
• As the two examples above show, there is a need to invest in capacity building that responds to job-market demand and self-employment, enhancing both entrepreneurship and life skills.
• ICTs offer big opportunities in terms of creating access to information, knowledge and markets, be it a market information system in Ghana or a rural radio programme in Bangladesh.

• Proctor, F. J. and V. Lucchesi (2012) Small-scale farming and youth in an era of rapid rural change. IIED/HIVOS, London/The Hague
• Youth Guidance Note aimed at enabling development practitioners/project staff to mainstream youth into rural development programmes
• Youth Policy Brief for policy-makers with practical advice for addressing rural youth issues 
  
  
  

By Emile A. Frison, Julia Marton-Lefèvre ‎ and Kanayo F. Nwanze

Agricultural biodiversity is the basis of our life on Earth. It is also the basis of healthy and resilient ecosystems. Yet it is under threat. Biodiversity provides more options for dietary diversity, can help smallholder farmers grow more food and earn more income, while protecting the natural resource base upon which their—and our—lives depend. It is time to redesign farms as productive, healthy, resilient ecosystems that conserve diversity within a broad landscape that provides food.

 Conserving biodiversity makes nutritional, ecological and economic sense. Targeted development projects can leverage these benefits to reduce hunger and poverty. For example, ancient grains high in quality proteins and rich in micronutrients such as quinoa and finger millets have been grown for generations, but in some places farmers were struggling to conserve and use these grains because there were limited markets. From 2001 to 2010, an international effort supported by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and coordinated by Bioversity International in Bolivia, Peru and India helped to enhance the sustainable conservation and use of such underutilized species, in order to unlock their potential value for income generation and nutrition.

Bioversity International and its national and local partners researched high-yielding Andean grain varieties, reintroduced lost species, ensured a wide diversity of genetic resources were preserved in seed banks, and introduced technologies to process grains for markets. The result was not only improved livelihoods but enhancement of cultural identity for communities.

When farmers are linked to value chains, they can reach markets for these primary grains, which are transformed into processed foods that are highly in demand.  Rural people living in poverty are important custodians of biodiversity and have found ingenious ways of utilizing it sustainably. When they achieve higher incomes through these activities it creates an incentive to conserve biodiversity sustainably.

In Uganda, the forest-dwelling Benet people have been deriving their livelihoods from the forested landscape of Mount Elgon for hundreds of years. In 1983 the Ugandan Government declared Mount Elgon a National Park, evicted the Benet communities and resettled them outside the forest. The park subsequently experienced land degradation, while communities that had looked after the Park’s natural resources for generations suffered from marginalization and increasing poverty.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) worked with the government, local communities and district authorities to realize a new vision for the Mount Elgon area, which included better-defined use and access rights for communities within the national park. After this new model replaced the exclusionary approach, harvesting of wild resources for food helped diversify and improve local diets. It also benefited Park management, with an 80% reduction in incidences of illegal timber extraction. In the buffer zone around the Park, IUCN helped communities apply their own by-laws to improve land-use decision-making. Communities elected to stop open access herding of cattle, which enabled simple but effective soil conservation techniques to be applied.

The preliminary results demonstrate that local communities have increased their incomes by more than 100% through collection and marketing of wild honey, a two-fold increase in milk production and vegetable gardening, and harvesting of two (rather than one) agriculture crops per season from the rich volcanic soils.

There are many other examples of farmers, scientists and policy-makers working together to re-establish traditional land management regimes where agriculture and conservation practices co-exist and complement each other. This can improve productivity, reduce fossil energy dependency, increase efficiency in plant nutrient utilization, improve water management, and contain the use of pesticides and fertilizers.

These positive examples demonstrate that it is time to take a landscape perspective on agriculture and natural resources: a more pragmatic approach involving community-based natural resource management, strong partnerships and flexibility.

In 2012, the IUCN World Conservation Congress delivered a ‘Call to Action for Agriculture and Conservation to Work Together.’ The conservation and agriculture sectors will need to collaborate if we are to find long-term sustainable solutions to food and nutrition security and preservation of biodiversity. We need commitment from partners and funders to a common vision, and decision-makers need to rethink policies separating the two agendas.

The major actors in conservation and agriculture are recognizing the critical contribution that biodiversity makes to human livelihoods, food and nutrition. However, we need a deeper understanding of how social, ecological, commercial and financial sectors, as well as cultural movements, can mobilize biodiversity’s contribution to food security and poverty reduction, particularly in view of climate change threats. Biodiversity can be both safeguarded and put to use within a sustainable and resilient agriculture that meets multiple needs: food production, environmental restoration and preservation, and improved livelihood for rural people.

The momentum for a new agricultural paradigm began at the 2012 IUCN World Conservation Congress where Bioversity and The Christensen Fund co-organized a plenary panel discussion and workshop facilitated by Ken Wilson from the Christensen Fund. This workshop ‘From Competition to Collaboration between Agriculture and Conservation’ was the impetus for partnerships that are continuing this effort.

Bioversity International, IFAD and IUCN are coming together with thought leaders in agriculture, conservation, public entities and industry to support a new paradigm in agriculture and sustainable development. Through CGIAR research programs, Bioversity is developing a research model of agriculture with smallholder farmers and partners that maximizes agricultural sustainability, productivity and conservation objectives, emphasizing the bridge between agriculture and conservation with biodiversity as a key link.

Our common vision is a global agricultural system that meets the challenge of transforming food systems while building resilience to climate change. This is especially vital for the regions of the world where large rural populations living in poverty rely on agriculture and ecosystems for their livelihoods.
Cross-sectoral cooperation will be vital to addressing shared global challenges now and in the future, including within the context of the post-2015 development agenda. We need to work together to ensure that biodiversity is recognized as key to tackling major issues such as food and nutrition security, climate change, human health, and poverty. Learn more about the Agriculture and Conservation Initiative.

Emile A. Frison is Director General of Bioversity International, Julia Marton-Lefèvre is Director General of IUCN, and Kanayo F. Nwanze is President of IFAD.

Originally posted by Thomas Reuters 

by Chris Neglia

While the international community is concerned about a rise in global mean temperature of 2°C, climate modelling indicates that we are more likely to reach 4°C by the turn of this century, says
Warren Evans, a senior advisor with the Sustainable Development Network of the World Bank.

Evans was speaking at IFAD’s Rome headquarters on the medium to long-term outlook for climate finance for development. Sourcing the World Bank’s recent study Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4° Celsius World Must Be Avoided Evans noted that the impacts of rising sea levels, ocean acidification, heat waves and extreme temperatures, droughts and floods are already evident worldwide.

Evans has led a prolific career in the development field, living over 25 years in South East Asia, and the last 10 in Washington D.C. with the Bank.

Addressing IFAD directors, staff members and country representatives, he explained his role now is to leave behind some of the tacit knowledge he accumulated and to share his perspective on the lending of development finance institutions amid rapidly changing demographic, economic and climate trends.

Much of Evans’ prognosis regarding the challenge of climate change to human systems was palpably shocking. For instance, there is fairly high confidence in attribution to climate change of the Russian heat wave in 2010, which resulted in an estimated death toll of 55,000 people. Drought conditions caused grain harvest losses of 25 per cent (estimated US$15 billion), leading the Russian government to impose a total ban on wheat exports. Evans also cautioned that humans had crossed the threshold of 400 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere.

“The news is all bad for coral reefs, and ocean ecosystems in general,” he said. If atmospheric CO2 reaches 450 ppm, coral reef growth around the world is expected to slow down considerably and at 550 ppm reefs are expected to start to dissolve. This represents a severe threat to the economic viability of Small Island Caribbean States (SIDS) and would be destructive to marine biodiversity.

The consequences that can be inferred from these projections underscore the urgency of leveraging climate finance for mitigation and adaptation actions, which can still limit the rate of warming to 2°C above preindustrial levels. This is where Evans sees the continued relevance of the World Bank, and other international funds such as IFAD, that are integrating climate objectives into development projects and programmes.

But how can we meet the financing challenge for global public goods, and what are the sources that climate finance is expected to flow from in the future? At present, most climate finance is allocated from public money. However, Evans cited the need to engage the private sector to a much greater extent than has been achieved hitherto. Commercial financial institutions, corporate actors, and institutional investors have the potential to mobilize the resources necessary to take serious climate action. Getting buy in from insurance companies, pension funds and mutual funds could be the tipping point for influencing more low carbon green investment.

Although Evans pointed out that these sources are very risk averse, their attitudes can change as development finance institutions start to take steps to manage risk, such as through portfolio diversification.
Important for IFAD, it was recognized in the discussion that sustainable agriculture is unique in that it builds small farmers’ climate resilience, as well as sequesters carbon in the soil. “Agriculture is the best opportunity to increase food security and reduce emissions,” said Evans. For this reason, climate finance should pay greater attention to increasing small farmers’ capacity to move to sustainable production systems.

In terms of the types of initiatives that climate finance will look to invest in, he mentioned the 6th replenishment of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the capitalization of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) as processes to watch for an indication of mitigation and adaptation activities that hold the greatest prospects for scaling up.

Evans provided many insights into how the World Bank and others can create incentives for the private sector provision of global public goods. Utilizing human ingenuity and innovative financing mechanisms, we have the solutions to avoid a 4°C warmer world that none of us can afford.