Coordinating finance for climate-smart agriculture
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. Given overlapping and interrelated investments required to meet the multiple objectives of climate-smart agriculture the financing systems that support these objectives must be closely linked to maximize the efficiency of climate-smart investments and to manage the fragmentation of sectoral solutions. However, funds for climate adaptation, mitigation, agricultural development, and the closely related goals of food security and sustainable land management generally come from different sources. Without a coordination framework of these funds, there can be a tendency towards inefficiency and insufficient access to financing for climate-smart agriculture. This paper presents the findings and analysis of an inventory the scale and structure of flows of climate and agricultural finance in the developing world, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa - a region of the world for which climate-smart agriculture will be especially critical to overall economic development and social welfare.