Climate-smart agriculture’ is a term that has emerged since 2010 to describe agricultural systems designed to simultaneously improve food security and rural livelihoods and support climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts. Meeting the financing requirements for climate-smart agriculture implementation will be a significant challenge.

Smallholders have important roles to play in both the prevention of dangerous climate change by reducing net global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, and our global ability to adapt to climate change.

This chapter describes obstacles to financing mitigation in smallholder agricultural systems, and provides recommendations to overcome these; it also emphasizes how smallholder agricultural finances overlaps with carbon finance. Analysis and recommendations are based on literature reviews and the author’s experience.