Search

Abstract Background Climate change poses a significant threat to agricultural production worldwide, with developing countries being particularly vulnerable to its negative impacts. Agriculture, which is a crucial factor in ensuring food security and livelihoods, is particularly vulnerable to changes in climate patterns, such as increased temperatures, drought, and extreme weather events. One approach to addressing these challenges is by promoting the adoption of climate‐smart agriculture (CSA) practices among farmers. CSA combines traditional agricultural practices with innovative techniques and technologies to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of climate change. infrastructure. By adopting CSA practices, farmers can enhance their resilience to climate variability and improve their productivity. Objectives This review examines the effectiveness of interventions promoting CSA to enhance farmers' knowledge of the benefits of CSA approaches, subsequent adoption of CSA, and disadoption of harmful agricultural practices in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs). Search Methods We searched 39 academic and online databases, websites, and repositories and screened over 19,000 experimental and quasi‐experimental publications to identify studies promoting CSA practices to women farmers. We conducted a citation tracking process on included studies and contacted experts to ensure a thorough search. Selection Criteria The review focused on studies that included interventions promoting climate‐smart agricultural approaches. Using EPPI Reviewer 4, two review authors independently screened the impact evaluation using a standardized screening tool. Data Collection and Analysis Information about participant characteristics, intervention characteristics, control conditions, research design, sample size, bias risk, outcomes, and results were gathered. Data collection and quantitative analysis were conducted using standard Campbell Collaboration methods. Main Results Eight impact evaluations were found (two randomized controlled trials) evaluating the effects of CSA practices on farmer's knowledge gains of the benefits of CSA practices and subsequent adoption. Knowledge dissemination approaches such as Farmer Field Schools and weather and climate information services were found to positively impact farmers' knowledge and adoption of specific CSA practices. However, the evidence supporting this claim is uncertain as a high risk of bias was assessed for five of the eight included studies. However, we found no effects on the disadoption of harmful practices such as pesticide overuse. Authors' Conclusions The evidence base for studies promoting climate‐smart agricultural approaches (CSA) to farmers in LMICs is small, and there is a lack of studies reporting sex‐disaggregated data and studies explicitly targeting women farmers. The review suggests that knowledge dissemination techniques are significantly effective in improving CSA knowledge and adoption, including integrated pest management techniques and their benefits, adoption of climate‐resilient rice seed varieties (STRVs), and use of botanical pesticides by farmers. More and better confidence studies are needed to inform policy and programming, including those that look at a wider range of interventions, including changing norms, values, and institutional arrangements.

Climate change poses a greater threat for more exposed and vulnerable countries, communities and social groups. People whose livelihood depends on the agriculture and food sector, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), face significant risk. In contexts with gendered roles in agri-food systems or where structural constraints to gender equality underlie unequal access to resources and services and constrain women’s agency, local climate hazards and stressors, such as droughts, floods, or shortened crop-growing seasons, tend to negatively affect women more than men and women’s adaptive capacities tend to be more restrained than men’s. Transformation toward just and sustainable agri-food systems in the face of climate change will not only depend on reducing but also on averting aggravated gender inequality in agri-food systems. In this paper, we developed and applied an accessible and versatile methodology to identify and map localities where climate change poses high risk especially for women in agri-food systems because of gendered exposure and vulnerability. We label these localities climate-agriculture-gender inequality hotspots. Applying our methodology to LMICs reveals that the countries at highest risk are majorly situated in Africa and Asia. Applying our methodology for agricultural activity-specific hotspot subnational areas to four focus countries, Mali, Zambia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, for instance, identifies a cluster of districts in Dhaka and Mymensingh divisions in Bangladesh as a hotspot for rice. The relevance and urgency of identifying localities where climate change hits agri-food systems hardest and is likely to negatively affect population groups or sectors that are particularly vulnerable is increasingly acknowledged in the literature and, in the spirit of leaving no one behind, in climate and development policy arenas. Hotspot maps can guide the allocation of scarce resources to most-at-risk populations. The climate-agriculture-gender inequality hotspot maps show where women involved in agri-food systems are at high climate risk while signaling that reducing this risk requires addressing the structural barriers to gender equality.

Abstract This is the protocol for a Campbell systematic review. The objectives are as follows: the primary objective of this review is to synthesise evidence of the effectiveness of interventions to promote climate‐smart agriculture to enhance agricultural outcomes and resilience of women farmers in low‐and‐middle‐income countries (research question 1). The secondary objective is to examine evidence along the causal pathway from access to interventions to promote climate‐smart agriculture to empowering women so that they can use climate‐smart technology. And such outcomes include knowledge sharing, agency improvement, resource access and decision‐making (research question 2).

Abstract This is the protocol for a Campbell systematic review. The objective of this systematic review is to assess the effectiveness of interventions with gender transformative approach (GTA) components in improving women's empowerment in low‐ and middle‐income countries, and to curate evidence on the mechanisms through which GTA works to improve women's empowerment in agriculture.