In collaboration with the USAID Feed the Future Learning Community for Supply Chain Resilience—a consortium comprised of climate scientists from the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS) and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT); and the agricultural lender Root Capital—The Sustainable Food Lab and Root Capital have produced An Introduction to Assessing Climate Resilience in Smallholder Supply Chains. The guide breaks down the complex concept of resilience into manageable themes for food and beverage companies and provides actionable process steps for applying these themes in smallholder crop-focused supply chains. These steps guide companies to first identify the risk to the supply chain, with an analysis of the climate threats relevant to their sourcing area (1. Know your risk and 2. Know your farmers); then look at farmers’ capacity to deal with the projected threat (3. Know your resilience); how to design strategy to respond to the diagnostic findings (4. Know how to build resilience); and finally, monitoring progress for continuous improvement (5. Know your progress). Embedded within the steps are references to a host of current resources—on measurement methodology, indicators, implementation, etc.— allowing companies to take advantage of leading tools to plan for the impacts of climate change as part of their risk management strategy or to act in line with their contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) or other sustainability commitments.
