In three regional economic communities–the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC)–agroclimatic changes will not only impact agriculture but also countries ability to fully benefit from regional and international trade, especially when rainfed-based agricultural commodities dominate trade flow.

Although the potential for innovative insurance mechanisms is real, additional work to understand their effectiveness and substantial scale-up efforts will be needed to achieve a sustainable expansion of efficient agricultural insurance markets in Africa.

“Blind farming,” that is, farming without precision agriculture (PA), is highly inefficient and exacerbates the challenges of addressing climate change. As in the case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, other African governments should promote PA as a way of optimizing the use of limited resources while mitigating the effects of climate change.

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) adoption
requires significant farmer market
participation to buy inputs and sell
outputs. Unfortunately, current policies
and investments remain focused on
production, and efforts to improve the
food value chain are limited. This situation
will need to change to support widespread
CSA adoption.

What is the climate-smart agriculture, gender, and nutrition nexus? Providing an integrated conceptual framework to guide interventions in the context of climate change, the authors argue that to go beyond incremental approaches to adaptation, these types of integrated approaches are essential to address the development challenges that the future climate creates.

Ecosystem-based adaptation and climate-smart agriculture (CSA) are new paradigms that offer an integrated solution to maximizing the productivity of agriculture and food systems under changing climate regimes. Ecosystembased adaptation and CSA offer an opportunity to break from traditional approaches and the silos that have limited the capacity for improving the food security condition of many.

Chapter 11 tracks progress on CAADP indicators outlined in the CAADP Results Framework for 2015–2025 in the areas of economic growth, food and nutrition security, employment, poverty, agricultural production and productivity, intra-African trade and market performance, and public agriculture-sector expenditure.

Given its heavy reliance on rainfed agriculture and projected climatic and weather changes, SSA faces multidimensional challenges in ensuring food and nutrition security as well as preserving its ecosystems. In this regard, climate-smart agriculture (CSA) can play an important role in addressing the interlinked challenges of food security and climate change.

Travel time to ports and inland markets of different sizes.

GIS data for this theme, accompanying data tables, metadata and user license can be accessed below.

Download GIS data
Download Data Tables and Metadata