Women farmers need equal access to assets, technology for “climate-smart agriculture”
New tool helps governments evaluate trade-offs in agricultural emissions
December 1, 2014, Lima, Peru—IFPRI researchers will present findings of a new series of policy notes on women farmers’ ability to adapt to climate change and contribute to a workshop on the economic viability of climate change mitigation policies at the annual climate conference known as COP 20.
The events will add evidence-based findings to the global discussion on climate change mitigation, adaptation, and policy that brings together governments, policymakers, researchers, and civil society to discuss how to confront climate change challenges. This year is the 20th session of the Conference of the Parties, or Lima Climate Change Conference, and is being held in Peru from December 1-12.
The policy notes focus on findings that suggest women farmers will not be able to cope with climate change equally to men without equal access to assets, capital, agricultural extension services, farm inputs, and technology, among other resources. The first challenge in addressing this disparity lies in supporting governments in their efforts to track how men and women deal with climate change differently by collecting gender-disaggregated data.
Policymakers must also address social protection schemes that enable women to hold onto their assets during severe weather shocks and target ways to close the gap between men and women’s ability to access climate information and utilize new agricultural technologies.
The discussion on policy notes will be hosted by Claudia Ringler, deputy director of the Environment and Production Technology division at IFPRI, at an official side event on December 3 and again at the Global Landscape Forum on December 6.
“It is extremely important that negotiators at the COP 20 consider the needs of women farmers in their policy recommendations if we are going to succeed in implementing climate smart agricultural policies across the globe,” Ringler said.
“In many developing countries, women need access to climate information and to new technologies to help them adapt,” Ringler added. “Policymakers should work to ensure that mitigation and adaptation strategies to climate change meet the needs of women as well as men.”
At the same side event, IFPRI has invited the National Economic and Development Authority of the Philippines as well as the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), to address specific gender dimensions of climate-smart-agriculture, in the context of South East Asia, and particularly the Philippines.
IFPRI will also share new results from work in progress on the potential benefits from promising new technologies in offsetting the adverse impacts of climate change as part of the CGIAR initiative on Global Futures and Strategic Foresight.
A workshop on December 2 will feature a new mitigation assessment tool designed to help governments evaluate tradeoffs in agricultural emissions for enhanced Low Emissions Development Strategies (LEDS). The event is being presented by the CGIAR Challenge Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security.
The tool has been applied in Colombia and Viet Nam but can be applied by any country interested in exploring country-wide effects and economic viability of Climate Change mitigation policies for the agricultural sector. Alex De Pinto, developer of the tool, said that as countries experience economic growth, they are better able to adopt technologies and production practices with low greenhouse gas emissions.
“Rather than embedding high emissions practices in their development and intervene on emissions reduction at a later stage, they can utilize Low Emissions Development Strategies (LEDS),” De Pinto said.
“Our analysis reaffirms the importance of including all land uses when analyzing policies that target emissions in agriculture,” De Pinto added. “It turns out that shifts in land uses have a greater impact on existing carbon stock, which might be more significant than the resulting changes in GHG emission from crop cultivation.”
The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) seeks sustainable solutions for ending hunger and poverty. IFPRI was established in 1975 to identify and analyze alternative national and international strategies and policies for meeting the food needs of the developing world, with particular emphasis on low-income countries and on the poorer groups in those countries. www.ifpri.org.