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This paper incorporates climate variables, including rainfall conditions and patterns, into an impact assessment of the Value Chain Development Project in the Maputo and Limpopo Corridors (PROSUL) in Mozambique. It focuses on activities targeting improved pasture management, supplemental feed sources and livestock value chain development. Results show weather and climate conditions significantly impact households’ adoption of project activities and livestock productivity outcomes. Project beneficiaries in drought-prone areas are more likely to provide supplemental feed in the dry season, though livestock birth rates are still lower in those areas.

This paper discusses which climate variables to collect, and from which sources, when incorporating them into an impact assessment. It finds that severe saline intrusion in Viet Name—caused by climate change and land and water use—had significant effects on crop choices and negative impacts on a range of production and livelihood outcomes.

Structural and rural transformation are intricately linked to food systems. Structural transformation captures a country’s level of dependence on agriculture, while rural transformation captures productivity in the agricultural sector. In particular, agri-food system and employment transitions influence structural and rural transformation and shape the spatial distribution of populations by influencing where people live, work and eat, all of which closely relate to food system transitions. Using country-level data from 85 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), this paper outlines a food systems index (FSI) and analyses the linkages between food systems and structural and rural transformation, as well as population distributions. It also selects a number of policy-relevant variables from World Development Indicators and uses machine learning methodology to shed light on patterns related to institutions, female empowerment, infrastructure, and health. The paper finds that countries in the lowest FSI group will see their youth populations more than double in the next 30 years, indicating that the food system investments of today will affect one third of global youth in the future. It also finds that structural transformation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for desirable food system outcomes. Rural transformation by itself without structural transformation is not enough either. For LMICs, broad development interventions are more important to progress food systems.

Food systems must serve different societal, health, and environmental objectives. They therefore face numerous challenges. This paper highlights five fundamental paradigm shifts that are required to overcome trade-offs and build synergies between health and nutrition, inclusive livelihoods, environmental sustainability, and food system resilience. We focus on the challenges to raise policy ambitions, harmonize production and consumption goals, improve connectivity between these goals, strengthen food system responsiveness, and anchor inclusive and participatory governance of food systems. Taken together, these paradigm shifts shape a new narrative for food system transformation that will be capable of responding to current and future policy challenges.

Climate change is imposing a transformative process on agricultural and food systems, threatening the livelihoods of people dependent on them, including a large proportion of the world’s poor people. Moving to a process that contributes to improving rather than endangering livelihoods is the challenge that climate change adaptation and resilience-building efforts currently face. Transformative adaptation that addresses the interactions between food systems and climate change requires adequate, accessible, and appropriate financing. Expanding climate finance resources from the public sector and creating an incentivizing environment for private sector investments is needed to attain adequate levels of financing. Appropriate finance must be designed to address specific characteristics of adaptation investments, such as risk, delayed returns, high social values, and new and unproven activities. Using blended finance integrated with development finance can generate financing appropriate to the investment needs.

International discussions on climate change increasingly recognize the importance of agriculture in adaptation and mitigation efforts. This study estimates the mitigation potential of agricultural practices supported by IFAD’s current investments in order to provide guidance for the design of future investments. Using data from field studies in scientific literature, this research estimates the effects of a large set of agricultural practices promoted by IFAD (and other development agencies) on soil organic carbon stocks, nitrous oxide emissions from soils, and methane emissions from rice paddies. Findings identify soil and rice management practices with the largest mitigation potential and those that can potentially increase emissions; discuss uncertainties in mitigation analyses; and provide recommendations to improve monitoring of mitigation benefits.

This paper aims at presenting empirical evidence from Zambia to better understand the linkages between climatic shocks, livelihood diversification and welfare outcomes with the goal of highlighting potential policy entry points to incentivize the types of diversification aimed at improving food security and resilience to climate shocks. We also investigate the role of different institutions in shaping diversification decisions to shed some light into potential policy levers at institutional level., FAO Document Repository: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i6277e.pdf