AFRICA AGRICULTURE STATUS REPORT 2016

BOX 4.4:
The CSA Compendium: A science-based decision support tool for
Climate-Smart Agriculture
The CSA concept has come a long way since FAO
created it in 2009, when the role of agriculture was
barely recognized in the international climate change
discourse (FAO 2010). It has quickly been integrated
into the global development agenda and in the climate
change discourse, where it culminated in the establishment
of the Global Alliance for CSA (GACSA) at the UN
Climate Summit in New York in 2014. There are now
multiple regional and sub-regional CSA Alliances that
aim to guide policy and investments to improve food security
and resilience to climate change.
However, given the multiple objectives and context
specificity, the scientific evidence to evaluate all three
pillars of CSA has been scant, which complicates translating
it from concept to concrete actions. To address
this need for field level practices, which are one of the
entry points to a CSA approach, the World Agroforestry
Centre (ICRAF) partnered with the CGIAR Research
Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security
(CCAFS), FAO, and the International Center for
Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) to conduct a meta-analysis
of all published scientific literature to date on potential
field level CSA practices.
The CSA compendium aims to evaluate current knowledge
on the effectiveness of a large set of (more than
100) management practices (extracted from more than
2,000 published papers) on productivity, resilience and
climate change mitigation in farming systems of Africa.
It also allows an assessment of synergies and tradeoffs
amongst the three pillars to enable prioritization of
different policy initiatives. Currently, a web-based platform
is being developed to make the CSA Compendium
available to policy makers (as well as scientists aiming
to fill research gaps) as a decision tool, which will allow
searches and simple analyses of CSA pillars under specific
soil types, agro-ecological zones, and categories
of practices (e.g., agronomy, agroforestry, livestock,
post-harvest systems, and energy systems). It is the
most comprehensive review of scientific evidence to
date that feeds into current and future CSA prioritization
tools, which incorporate evidence base with conceptual
approaches to support national prioritization efforts
among multiple objectives.
Many agricultural practices have been labeled as “CSA”
(e.g., see AGRA, 2014b; CCAFS, 2013; FAO, 2014a).,
This creates confusion because although many of
these practices are likely to be CSA in some places,
none of them are likely to be CSA everywhere. An additional
challenge comes from the time dimension, as
under the dynamic effects of climate change, what is
CSA today might not be by 2030, and policies need to
include these dimensions into account before promoting
interventions for food security and resilience. Given
that CSA is an approach to policy making, rather than a
set of practices, the CSA compendium will shed light on
such uncertainty and confusion to support policies that
can create resilient food systems in Africa in spite of the
challenges of climate change.
Source: Rosenstock et al. (2015)
of tree-based conservation and production practices for
agricultural lands. Some important sustainability issues
on which agroforestry can assist forestry are: biological
diversity, wood and non-timber products, ecosystem integrity,
soil and water quality, terrestrial carbon storage,
and socio-economic benefits (Ruark, Schoeneberger, &
Nair, 2003). Agroforestry therefore serves to improve the
resilience of farmers and increase their household income
through harvesting diverse products at different times of
the year. It also brings job opportunities from the processing
of tree products, expanding the economic benefits to
rural communities and national economies. Agroforestry
systems can be conceived for spaces varying from plots to
farms to landscapes.
In terms of scaling up, WRI (2014) reports that within SSA,
agroforestry and water harvesting could potentially be implemented
on more than 300 million hectares. If improved
soil and water management practices were implemented
on just 25 percent of this cropland and resulted in increasing
crop yields by an average of 50 percent, farmers would
produce an estimated 22 million more tonnes of food per
year (WRI, 2014).
90 AFRICA AGRICULTURE STATUS REPORT 2016