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Almost every aspect of trying to reduce climate change involves weighing alternatives and then setting priorities. For example, you could plant trees to store carbon, but that might reduce the amount of food you can grow on the same land. Or you could add fertilizers to boost food production, but...

Smallholder farmers provide up to 80 percent of the food supply in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Yet very little is known about either the contribution of smallholder systems to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions or the options for smallholders to mitigate their emissions and benefit from doing so. Th...

It is no great secret that climate change presents a massive challenge to agriculture. While some regions will develop a climate that favours agriculture, most will not. Even in places where conditions improve, many resource-poor smallholders will be hard pressed to take advantage of the addition...

Through the ages, farmers have used indigenous knowledge and traditional coping strategies to adapt to changes in weather and climatic conditions. Now, increasingly erratic climate variability is making it difficult for farmers to keep up. Climate uncertainty often influences farmers’ decisions. ...

Bad weather is a serious risk for low-income farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk and others whose livelihoods depend on the natural resource base. CCAFS is working with partners around the world to develop weather index-based insurance schemes that help secure farmers’ livelihoods and give them the...

Social learning brings multiple stakeholders together to provide their insights on a complex problem in order to arrive at shared solutions.

In East Africa, agricultural systems are highly vulnerable to climate change and variability because of high dependence on rainfall. The increasing frequency and severity of drought, heat and cold stress as well as floods are likely to lead to major food crises in the region. Rapid population gro...

In pilot trainings in Tanzania, farmers have received climate data together with participatory tools to help them evaluate their options and make on-farm decisions. The approach is now being scaled up in Malawi and Tanzania through training agricultural extension agents and NGO staff to provide c...

Tracking change is how you stay on the path to a goal. That’s why the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) wants to measure how agricultural practices are evolving in response to climate change and other pressures. In 2010-2011 CCAFS worked with local pa...

At a weather research station in Makueni, Kenya, about a dozen farmers are gathered in an outdoor classroom. Scant and variable rainfall is a big problem in Makueni, so a training program from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) is tutoring the group on ...