1. Introduction
1.1. Climate change, agriculture and adaptation
It is widely accepted that the climate is changing and that humanity is contributing to this change (IPCC 2014, p. 2). This fact has given rise to the suggestion that we have entered a new geological epoch, going from the Holocene to what is now proposed as the Anthropocene (Dalby 2016). This epoch is characterised by human activity as one of the major forces
affecting the environment, where we are pushing what Rockström et al. (2009) has termed
“planetary boundaries for a safe operating space for humanity.” The international community
3 has pledged through the Paris Agreement to try to limit global warming to below 2°C, aiming for 1.5°C (UNFCCC 2015, p. 3). This goal is ambitious and requires significant and rapid reductions in human emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG).
As a primary sector, agriculture is highly vulnerable to climate change and so are the farmers dependent on it (FAO 2017). There are different scenarios considering future
temperature increases, which will lead to different impacts of climate change. Regardless of the impossibility of projecting the future, it is already clear that there is a strong call for the agricultural sector to adapt to current and future climate change (IPCC 2014). At the same time, agricultural activities and changes in land use are responsible for about 24 percent of GHG emissions, which points to the sector’s important role in relation to mitigation (IPCC 2014, p. 47). A focus on small scale farmers is important since 98 percent of all farms globally are family run farms (Martinez-Baron et al. 2018, p. 112). This thesis looks at an empirical example of an adaptation intervention through a Climate Smart Agriculture project in Nepal by doing a case study and seeks to contribute to what Taylor (2017, p. 2) terms
“emerging, yet sparse academic literature on CSA”.
1.1.1 Climate Smart Agriculture as adaptation
Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) is an umbrella term that includes strategies aiming to change farming practices and agriculture in ways that integrate three pillars: a) mitigation, b) adaptation and c) food security (FAO n.d.). The concept was developed to get a better understanding of the interconnected relationship between agriculture and climate change, a relationship that shows the importance of promoting agricultural developments that are climate-resilient. The global food crisis in 2007-2008 turned attention towards the importance of food security for the world’s poor and underscored the importance of including this when developing integrated policies. This provides a context for the threefold goal of CSA
(Chandra, McNamara & Dargusch 2017). When describing the concept’s origin, Taylor (2017) points to both the World Bank (WB) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as two global institutions promoting and developing CSA. The WB used the term climate-smart for policies that targeted vulnerability, development and a financial transition to green growth while simultaneously limiting emissions. FAO formalized CSA as defined by its three pillars in 2010 and further developed it through the Climate Smart Agriculture Sourcebook in 2013. The term has been embraced globally since it was formally
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developed in 2010 and it has been promoted by leading international organizations (Taylor 2015, Tissier & Grosclaude 2016). The strategies are diverse and the concept is developed with the intention of being flexible and able to fit into different local contexts (FAO, n.d.).
Rosenstock et al. (2016, p. 11) writes that CSA does not consist of completely new practices, but it is rather framed as an integrated approach that contributes to the triple-win goal. They also highlight that it is important that the practices are culturally appropriate and context specific in both time and place, in order to be applied. Food and agriculture have social, economic, political and cultural aspects connected to them, but agriculture is ultimately a socio-ecological process. This means that despite human input and attempts to control it, food production is happening at the interaction between society and nature.
Chandra, McNamara & Dargusch’s (2017) literature review of the concept of CSA from 2004-2016 shows that there were different definitions used in the literature and these definitions encompassed a variety of on-farm practices. For this reason the concept is
critiqued because the triple-win framing creates a vague foundation for a common definition and criteria. Neufeldt et al. (2013) argue that the limited understanding of the interactions between the three pillars means that essentially all agricultural practices with some
improvement will fit under the label of CSA. The lack of common criteria allows for diverse strategies to be promoted as CSA, although they may have very different outcomes and consequences. One concern is that the goal of food security is often connected to enhancing production of food, which can have a negative impact on the goal of adaptation, if increasing production is at the expense of maintaining flexibility within farming. Taylor’s (2017, p. 9) arguments back this position and he also states that marginalized groups might not have the capacity to protect the role the agroecosystem plays for their society and can risk being ignored under the label of CSA. Other critics point out that the concept is nothing more than a rebranding of farming practices that do not necessarily address aspects connected to climate change (Chandra, McNamara & Dargusch 2017). To have increased resilience as the goal of adaptation is also questioned, as resilience at a national level does not guarantee that this is not at the expense of certain groups at the local level (Taylor 2017, p. 10).
Chandra, McNamara, & Dargusch (2017) highlights three key trends from research on CSA: a focus on developing countries, an emphasis on scientific/technical issues and a view of the concept as re-branding sustainable agricultural practices. Based on this, they point to several aspects that are important for future research, two of these being the local level and
5 social aspects such as gender. This thesis seeks to take these aspects into account while also responding to Thompson-Hall, Carr and Pascual’s (2016) and Djoudi et al. (2016) emphasis on the importance of an intersectional approach to how different social identities need to be considered when working with rural adaptation.