Theme Specific Highlights - Climate
Climate related conference sessions focused on the benefits of adopting digital technologies that promote climate-friendly solutions and help mitigate the impact of climate change in LMICs. Some of the challenges and potential solutions discussed include:
1
Lack of climate risk appraisal products
2
Lack of timely and accurate weather information
3
Poor access to technical knowledge preventing shift towards regenerative agriculture
4
Limited knowledge of and lack of access to carbon market place
Challenge: Lack of climate risk appraisal products
Climate change poses a great risk to the economy, including the financial sector. Financial institutions (FIs) need to manage both their own climate-related financial exposure as well as their initiatives towards financing a green agenda, which may be critical for mitigating climate risk. However, customized climate risk appraisal products that can help FIs (especially small FIs) assess the credit worthiness of smallholder farmers are currently not available. This limits the ability of FIs to undertake due diligence before lending or providing reinsurance on capital-intensive green infrastructure.
POTENTIAL SOLUTION: Technology providers, along with governments and financial institutions, may develop customized climate-risk appraisal products.
The InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB) in partnership with the Government of Canada and DAI has developed the EcoMicro project, to assist the Belize Credit Union League (BCUL) and three of the BCUL’s credit unions.
Under this project, a digital tool, Climate TARP (CTARP) is developed for climate risk assessment. Using remote sensing and satellite data, the tool captures the geo location of the farmer’s field from a climatological perspective. CTARP assesses portfolio vulnerability from three different perspectives: a) Business information and its relationship with the investment portfolio; b) Business location analyzed from a climatological perspective, specifically the probability of an adverse climate event occurring and its impact; and c) Level of preparation demonstrated by the client and the client site to assimilate climate adaptation technologies and techniques.
Further, it provides the credit risk assessment officers with the climate risk profile of that particular location which helps in decision making towards lending to farmers for a particular activity. It also helps the credit officers make better recommendations to farmers on possible activities for loan utilization.
Challenge: Lack of timely and accurate weather information
The global food and nutrition ecosystem is expected to face critical challenges in the near future, due to the rise in global food demand, which is driven by population growth and changing dietary patterns. The ecosystem’s ability to meet these increasing demands is expected to be impaired by deteriorating soil quality, decreasing availability of freshwater and industrial farming’s high dependence on fossil energy sources for mechanization. These challenges pose a critical risk to agricultural productivity.
One of the potential solutions to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change is making informed decisions. Satellite data can help farmers make informed decisions and improve food security. However, the adoption of remote sensing data based early warning systems is low among smallholder farmers, which results in a lack of timely and accurate information about adverse weather events and a corresponding loss in crop production.
POTENTIAL SOLUTION: Digital technologies integrated with geospatial and frontier advances such as cloud computing, high resolution satellite data accessibility, AI and ML may be an important aid in resolving food security related challenges through data-driven and stakeholder-inclusive decisions. Moreover, multi-stakeholder partnerships involving research institutions, donor agencies, regional institutes, agtechs, and governments may work in synchronization to develop tools to provide timely information on adverse weather events.
SERVIR- A joint initiative of NASA and USAID in collaboration with leading geospatial organizations in Asia, Africa and Latin America, is working towards addressing critical challenges in climate change, food security, water and related disasters, land use, and air quality.
SERVIR co-develops innovative solutions through a network of regional hubs to improve resilience against climate disasters and sustainable resource management at local, national, and regional scales. It uses earth observation data, satellite date, remote sensing, AI and ML solutions that respond to the specific needs of governments. This tool is currently being used as a crop mapping system by Meteorological service officers in Kenya, as an early drought warning system in Vietnam, as a weather forecast and warning system by the Bangladesh government, and as a surface mapping system in Senegal. Together, NASA’s technological capacity combined with USAID’s program management expertise, expansive presence and deep collaborations with local partners has immense potential to influence SERVIRs wide-spread adoption across the globe.
Challenge: Poor access to technical knowledge preventing a shift towards regenerative agriculture
The agriculture sector is at the center of the nexus between climate change, food and nutrition, water and soil, and sustainable livelihoods. Hence, the sector plays a key role in creating more resilient supply chains, restoring soil health and enabling green-livelihood opportunities at scale. Furthermore, the growing adoption of IoT-enabled devices and the increasing number of use cases of technologies in agriculture have enabled innovative solutions for collaborative action. Around 90% of farmers working on 600 million smallholder farms are exposed to economic and environmental risks. The lack of technical and professional training, and assured market linkages, limit smallholder farmers from pursuing regenerative/ climate-resilient agriculture practices, which in turn results in their being more vulnerable to weather related risks due to biodiversity loss.
Some large corporations buy directly or indirectly from farmers, but they are under pressure from authorities to implement traceability, which requires them to demonstrate that the procurement is sustainable and responsible. Because responsible procurement necessitates regenerative agriculture on the part of farmers, there is a rising need to strengthen the supply chain by integrating various stakeholders and making smallholder farmers more resilient to climate hazards.
POTENTIAL SOLUTION: Digital solutions-based technical and vocational training, organized by industry players with assured market linkages, is the most efficient way to build capacity of smallholder farmers’ and enable a shift towards climate-resilient regenerative agriculture. Also, monitoring and measuring the impact of such training is critical. ICT solutions providers, along with industry players, can collaborate to provide training to smallholder farmers and ensure market linkages for procurement of their produce. This, in turn, may aid industry participants in implementing traceability throughout the supply chain.
Scale-Up Training Traceability and Impact (SUTTI) by Ksapa, to connect industry players with farmers.
SUTTI is an initiative that allows organizations to create scalable training programs to help farmers’ access good agricultural practices by combining digital solutions, program management and innovative finance. The objective of the initiative is to improve the livelihood of farmers’ while generating positive environmental and biodiversity outcomes
Under SUTTI, KSAPA in collaboration with donor organizations, governments, and local agencies, designs and runs hybrid training programs that combine in-person training with digital learning.
Under the training programs, farmers are informed and trained about regenerative agricultural practices that reduce GHG emissions. At the same time, SUTTI digitally collects data directly from farmers to measure the actual impact of the training and also to value carbon credits from newly adopted agricultural practices. The ultimate goal is to reward farmers for farming more sustainably. SUTTI employs a farmer-centric mobile-first offline capable web app that is simple, for both non-digitally savvy farmers and illiterate farmers, to use. This allows SUTTI to disseminate training content and measure impact in a cost-effective manner. On the other hand, SUTTI improves procurement mapping for industrial partners via impact measurement and a transactions database, helping implement traceability across the supply chain.
Currently, using SUTTI, KSAPA is working with Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Plantations, France’s Ministry of Economy and the Michelin Group to support Sri Lankan rubber farmers under the Rubber Improvement of Value chain & Embedded Smallholders Resilience (RIVER) project. Ksapa is responsible for the design and management of this program which supports Sri Lankan smallholder farmers in rubber cultivation. The operational implementation of the project i.e., the delivery of training sessions to farmers is undertaken by Camso Loadstar, a local subsidiary of the Michelin Group.
Challenge: Limited knowledge and lack of access to carbon market place
Over the past few years, a broad range of funding mechanisms has emerged to help smallholder farmers’ shift towards climate-resilient agriculture. One such mechanism that has gained traction among investors worldwide is carbon trading. This new funding mechanism has the potential to accelerate the transition to regenerative agriculture; however, it is currently limited to large farms in developed countries. It mainly connects the first mile of highly fragmented commodity supply chains, leaving smallholder farmers out of the equation. This is largely because of high monitoring and certification costs. Hence, there is a need to create a platform that brings together local communities, industry players, and farmers, with the objective of encouraging farmers to shift towards regenerative agriculture while also enabling them to trade carbon credits generated as a result of this shift.
POTENTIAL SOLUTION: Digital solutions appear to be a very powerful tool to make smallholder farmers' inclusion in carbon projects possible by monetizing the farmers' shift towards regenerative agriculture. A common set of standards may be developed, based on which a cost-efficient digital solution for field carbon measurement may be designed. Local institutions may play a larger role in linking farmers to such tools.
Rabobank is developing its own Agroforestry Carbon Removal Units for the Organic Restoration of Nature (Acorn platform) along with partners like GIZ, Microsoft, Maastricht University, One Acre Fund etc. The Acorn platform opens the international carbon market up to smallholder farmers with the aim of supporting them to make a transition from monoculture farming to agroforestry.
Rabobank is building a global, transparent, remote-sensing-technology-enabled, trusted marketplace for carbon sequestration. An Acorn Carbon Removal unit (CRU) is only sold after trees have converted carbon into biomass. AI and ground validation technology are utilized for biomass measuring and ground validation, making sequestration monitoring and monetization cost-effective and scalable. Rabobank has also developed the Acorn standard framework and methodology, which has been approved by Plan vivo. Therefore, projects that adhere to these framework criteria will automatically be certified to trade the carbon credits generated. The traceability of Acorn CRUs also assures corporations of the credibility of the carbon unit traded.
Under the Acorn platform, for every carbon removal unit sold, 80% flows back to the farmer. 10% is retained by Acorn to cover the operational costs.. The remaining 10% is retained by the local implementing party to cover their cost of onboarding the farmers onto the platform. Currently, this platform has onboarded around 10,000 farmers from Africa. Local players play an important role in providing farmers with technical assistance in implementing an efficient agroforestry model to better utilize their land.