| Sumario: | Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has been promoted since 2011 to increase productivity,
improve resilience to climate variability and change and reduce greenhouse gas emission,
where feasible, in farming systems globally and especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. CSA is
unique, by comparison, to some other agricultural development approaches because it is
outcome oriented, explicitly considers synergies and trade-offs among food and environment
objectives and promotes solutions relevant to specific times and places. These advances however complicate CSA programming and investments. Such a flexible framework often
leaves policy makers and program developers asking what is and what is not climate-smart?
This guide provides a simple qualitative planning tool to help answer that question. With the
information compiled here based on expert survey, users can conduct a rapid appraisal of the
‘climate-smartness’ of management practices and technologies. Specifically, users can
explore suggested management practices and technologies based on (1) climate risks they
address, (2) constraints to adoption and (3) potential impacts on productivity, resilience and
mitigation when changing management of cereal-, paddy rice-, tree-, livestock- and fish-based
systems. These three characteristics of risks, constraints and outcomes represent a minimum
level of information to consider when deciding whether a technique is climate-smart or not
and potential concerns or opportunities. The document concludes with a compilation of
technical manuals and extension guides on practices to provide user instructions on
implementing technologies in the field.
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