In 2010, scientists at the World Agroforestry Centre began to monitor and assess the carbon footprint of their headquarters in Nairobi. By January 2013, the headquarters was officially certified carbon neutral, and a year later the whole organization followed suit. This meant that the Centre was the first CGIAR institution to become fully carbon neutral.

In July 2014, the Centre won the prestigious 2014 InsideNGO Operational Excellence Award in its Cross Operations Category. This goes to individuals or teams that represent multiple operational areas. “In gaining our carbon neutral status, there has been a very close collaboration between the scientists and administrators,” says Henry Neufeldt, head of climate change research at the Centre, “and the InsideNGO award recognizes that.”

The award was presented at a ceremony in Washington, DC, following InsideNGOs’ annual conference in July 2014. The event hosted over 1300 presenters, exhibitors and visitors. In his acceptance speech given by video, Laksiri Abeysekera, deputy director general for finance and corporate services, said: “We are delighted to receive this award, and remain grateful to the InsideNGO fraternity, which has provided such a powerful forum in which we can share, compare and benchmark our best practices, and network with like-minded partners to achieve excellence in service delivery.” He highlighted the importance of the scientific and administrative sides working together as equal partners.

The Centre hopes that other institutions belonging to the CGIAR will follow its lead. “At present, we are the only research centre which is fully carbon neutral, and the only one which has developed a rigorous methodology to assess the carbon budget,” explains Henry Neufeldt’s colleague Audrey Chenevoy. The Centre has introduced a system of levies – for example on international and domestic flights, and commuting – which are channelled into its carbon footprint fund. This is used to buy carbon credits, which are supporting various conservation and reforestation projects around the world.

In a side event at the 20th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 20) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, held in Lima, Peru, in December 2014, Peru’s Minister for Agriculture Juan Manuel Benitez Ramos launched iNAMAzonia. This is a landscapebased, agricultural Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Action (NAMA) that seeks to create a favourable environment for sustainably intensified coffee, cocoa, livestock and oil palm production, and at the same time promote the ecological restoration of degraded land in the Peruvian Amazon.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation (MINAGRI), through the coordinating role of the National Forest and Wildlife Service (SERFOR), is leading the development of the iNAMAzonia, with the support of scientists from the World Agroforestry Centre in collaboration with Rainforest Alliance, New Climate Institute and GIZ. NAMAs were first used in the Bali Action Plan, which was agreed at the UN climate change conference in Bali in 2007. They comprise sets of policies and activities that countries undertake as part of their commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In Peru, forest conversion and land use change accounts for 41% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, and the agricultural sector is also a major contributor. Reducing these emissions has become a priority for a country committed to reducing net deforestation to zero, by 2020.

Valentina Robiglio and her colleagues from the World Agroforestry Centre helped conceptualize and write NAMAs for cocoa, coffee, oil palm and livestock. These were presented in five concept notes at COP 20. Attractively written in non-technical language, each two-page note provides a description of the sector in question, the institutional setting, a series of emission reduction goals and related interventions.

“The concept of iNAMAzonia emerged from a strong interaction between scientists, practitioners and government authorities,” says Valentina. “It would not have been possible without coordination between the teams from SERFOR and of the Bosques-PNCBBCC (Programa Nacional Conservacion de Bosques y Cambio Climatico).” The challenge now is to make the NAMAs operational.

During the last 15 years, cocoa production has tripled and Peru is now the fourth largest Latin American exporter. However, growth has come at a cost: cocoa contributes an estimated 30% of the greenhouse gas emissions from forest conversion and 28% of emissions from the agricultural section. Reducing these is crucial to achieving national mitigation targets.

The NAMA for the cocoa sector seeks to promote sustainable practices, reduce emissions by 28 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2025, increase productivity by more than 50%, and improve the livelihoods of the 45,000 cocoa producers in the Amazon region through higher yields and the diversification of revenues. This will be done by way of carbon stock enhancement through enrichment planting – in other words, a shift from pure cocoa stands to cocoa agroforestry; through the conversion of fallows and abandoned degraded land into cocoa agroforestry systems; and by reducing emissions along the various phases of the cocoa production and marketing chain. The coffee sector NAMA seeks to reduce emissions by 53 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2025 and improve the livelihoods of more than 200,000 producers. The actions promoted are similar to those for cocoa. The palm oil NAMA will seek to reduce the amount of forest being felled to make way for plantations. It will also reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the fresh fruit production stages and in transport and processing.

Over the last few years, national annual per capita consumption of meat has grown by 25% in Peru, and the increase in demand is one of the reasons why there has been an expansion of pasture in the Peruvian Amazon. This usually occurs in areas that were previously deforested, and unsustainable livestock and pasture management practices are now leading to a vicious cycle of land degradation and declining productivity. The livestock NAMA seeks to promote mitigation measures that have the potential to increase the carbon efficiency of meat and milk production by increasing animal and pasture productivity. It will also encourage farmers to establish living fences and plant trees to recover degraded land for agricultural production.

Reducing the vulnerability of smallholder farmers in the global South to climate change is the aim of many development projects. Climate change is projected to have a major effect on western Kenya in general, and the Nyando River Basin in particular, and this area has been the focus of a climate change project involving a collaboration between the Coady International Institute and the World Agroforestry Centre. Funded by the Comart Foundation from Canada, the pilot phase, which ran from 2008 to 2010, introduced four groups of farmers to a range of agroforestry practices.

The second phase of the project, which came to an end in 2014, used asset-based communitydriven (ABCD) development principles and value chain analysis to help four farming communities work out the best way of using their assets to improve their welfare.

“Our approach differs from that of many other projects in that it really is participatory,” explains Lisa Fuchs of the World Agroforestry Centre. “Many projects claim they are participatory, but they often aren’t as the range of activities they promote is constrained by personnel, expertise and the objectives of the funders.” This means that they sometimes introduce activities that are inappropriate and do little or nothing to support project members achieve sustainable livelihoods the long-term.

“For many farmers, the ABCD approach was a revelation,” recalls Lisa. “It encouraged them to think and plan together as a group in a way they never had before, and reflect on how they could make the most of the assets they had.”

When researchers compared the activities of farmers involved in the project with those of control groups outside the project, they found significant differences. Farmers involved with the project were more likely to have undertaken agroforestry practices, and in the Middle Nyando maize and coffee production of project groups was vastly superior to that of control groups, with 17% more members harvesting coffee than in control groups. Crop sales, especially of beans, coffee and maize, were also superior among project group members.

And happier too?

The Coady International-funded project introduced farmers’ groups to a range of agroforestry practices

The improvements in material welfare – better crops yields, greater food security – are just part of the story. During the course of the project, Lisa conducted structured focus group interviews to evaluate the subjective well-being of groups of farmers who had been using asset-based community-team development principles. She found that subjective well-being levels among project group members were significantly superior to those of control groups who were not involved in the ABCD approach.

“The key questions we wanted to answer were: how do you conceptualizse and measure well-being and what does it mean to have a good life?” explains Lisa. She developed a participatory methodology for assessing subjective well-being, based partly on the works of the Indian philosopher and economist Amartya Kumar Sen. When asked what they wanted out of life, the respondents, who were divided in gender and age groups, provided lists of things or aspirations, and these were refined into 20 well-being criteria. Lisa and her colleagues then conducted a household survey that allowed them to produce quantitative analysis based on quantitative data. “We were astonished by the results,” she recalls. “The most important thing for a majority of respondents was to be God-fearing; to be happy was to be close to God and engaged in faith-based activities.”

Does this have any practical significance? Henry Neufeldt, head of climate change research at the World Agroforestry Centre, believes it does. “The vast majority of projects take a needs-based approach; in other words, they are defined by what people lack, rather than what they aspire to.” he says. “Our asset-based approach is different, because it encourages people to think about they would like to achieve with their existing assets. I think this research shows that if you are designing a project, you need to understand not only people’s needs, but their aspirations, and you need to make sure the project is aligned with their interests and beliefs.”

Based on the success of the participatory approaches pioneered by the project in the Nyando Valley, a new 2-year phase was launched in 2015. This will involve the scaling up of agriculture and agroforestry best practices to at least 2000 farmers. To support the farmers in their decision-making, best practices will be selected by project groups and implemented through farmer-to-farmer extension after training in a number of group capacity development courses. These include ABCD methods and tools, group dynamics and leadership, as well as group savings and loaning. Drawing on their results on localised understanding of well-being, the researchers intend to work with people’s faith when helping them in the design and implementation of their community action plans.

Tropical peatlands contain three times more carbon in one metre of depth than a fully developed tropical rainforest, and tropical peatlands can be up to 10 metres deep. Around 70% of tropical peatlands are found in Southeast Asia, and their drainage and conversion to other land uses – such as oil palm estates – releases significant quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This explains why Indonesia is one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases after China and the United States, with about half derived from peat fires and decomposition.

Despite their importance, there is still considerable confusion about the way in which carbon is stored and released from peatlands, and the measures which need to be taken to reduce emissions. “Tropical peatlands are known not only for their high carbon emissions in response to land use change, but as hotspots of debate about associated data uncertainties,” says Meine van Noordwijk, chief science adviser at the World Agroforestry Centre and lead author of Mud, muddle and models in the knowledge value-chain to action on tropical peatland conservation.

The knowledge value chain is long and complex. “First, we need to gain a better understanding of peatland processes so that we can measure the emissions accurately,” says Meine. “Then there needs to be a willingness to act – in the past, many governments have been in denial about the scale of peatland emissions – and, of course, an ability to act.” This could involve re-wetting, reforestation and agroforestry, although there is still much debate about which activities are most effective. Just as importantly, says Meine, we need to think about alternative livelihood options for the people who live in peatlands, so that they can continue making a living without threatening the ecology or increasing carbon emissions.

Meine and his colleagues concluded that to shorten the denial and conspiracy-theory stages of debate that have tended to hamper the willingness and ability to act, networks of international and national scientists should be involved at a very early stage in identifying policy-sensitive environmental issues. While drainage of peatlands triggers landscapescale increases in emissions, factors beyond drainage depth, including nutrient supply, may have a major influence on decomposition rates, and therefore emissions. In short, more work needs to be done on both science and policy issues related to peatlands.

Searching for the facts in the Philippines

The peatland is currently under threat of clearance

The Philippines is in the early stages of identifying, measuring and understanding its peatlands. To rectify the gaps in knowledge, Rodel Lasco, country coordinator for the World Agroforestry Centre, and his colleagues estimated the amount of carbon stored in the Caimpugan peatland in Mindanao, one of the most ecologically significant wetlands in the country.

They found that the most important carbon store was peat soil, which stored more carbon than all the above-ground stocks. In total, the Caimpugan peatland, which covers 5487 hectares, stores an estimated 22.9 million tonnes of carbon, and therefore represents a substantial and space-efficient carbon store compared to other forest types in the country.

The peatland is currently under threat of clearance through conversion to agricultural land and by disturbance from ecotourism development. Rodel and his colleagues have advised that activities in and around the area should be monitored closely in order to conserve the peatland’s ecological integrity.

References

Meine van Noordwijk et al. 2013. Reassessing peat-based emissions from tropical land use. ASB Policybrief 36. Nairobi: ASB Partnership for the Tropical Forest Margins Meine van Noordwijk et al. 2014. Mud, muddle and models in the knowledge value-chain to action on tropical peatland conservation. Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change,

“We conquered a small universe in a short amount of time,” says Constance Neely, reflecting on the achievements of a workshop which she helped to organize in Nairobi, in October 2014. “In just two days, we reviewed over 40 Kenyan climate-smart agriculture projects, and we came up with some coherent technical and policy messages.”

The original idea was to organize a workshop to review the achievements of the Mitigation of Climate Change in Agriculture (MICCA) project. However, Constance, who divides her time between the World Agroforestry Centre and the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), decided that it would make more sense to involve as many people as possible, from as many different initiatives, in a climate-smart workshop.

Participants at the workshop, which was convened by FAO, the World Agroforestry Centre, the Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and the Climate Change Unit of Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, included scientists, farmers, development practitioners and policy makers. They shared and analysed scientific evidence and field experience from 44 projects in working groups which focused on climate information and insurance, cropping systems, livestock and aquaculture, energy, conservation agriculture and agroforestry, climate-smart agriculture and gender, farmer adoption, advisory and capacity development, and markets and microfinance.

“Each group discussed what made projects work, explored how to build capacity and came up with a clear set of messages,” says Sabrina Chesterman, lead author with Constance of the technical workshop document, which has been published as a CCAFS Working Paper: Evidence and Policy Implications of Climate Smart Agriculture in Kenya.

This highlights an array of different climatesmart practices which are currently being adopted by Kenyan farmers, including agroforestry, conservation agriculture, integrated crop production systems and efficient grazing practices. These are designed to help farmers increase food production, become more resilient to climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“The process used was as important as the technical material,” says Constance. “When the stakeholders interact with the evidence and experiences based on their desired outcome, the commonalities and tensions emerge and lessons learned are steadily forged.”

The policy messages outlined in the working paper were subsequently used in the revision of Kenya’s 2014 Draft National Climate Change Policy Framework. A policy brief – Transitioning Towards Climate Smart Agriculture in Kenya: Linking Research, Practice and Policy – introduced the policy messages to a wider audience. It was launched at the UN Climate Change Meeting (COP 20) in Peru in December 2014.

Here, in brief, are the key messages:

•  Climate-smart agriculture should contribute to building opportunities for employment, education and commerce. It is smart precisely because it addresses a range of key development issues.

• Research, agricultural activities and policy development should be integrated from the outset. This will help to improve decision-making at all levels.

• Integrating the production of livestock, fish, crops and trees on farms or throughout the landscape can enhance productivity, strengthen the resilience of farming systems and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

• Specific attention should be paid to building the capacity of women and young people who manage natural resources.

•   It is important to connect policies to regulations, as inconsistencies between the two can undermine climate-smart agriculture.
• Climate-smart agriculture still faces a number of knowledge gaps, such as the lack of baseline data for measuring, reporting and verifying the effectiveness of climate-smart agriculture

Reference

Transitioning Towards Climate Smart Agriculture in Kenya: Linking Research, Practice and Policy. 2015, FAO