“We can’t talk about climate smart agriculture without talking about resilient communities. If communities can’t deal with shocks, we can’t build up resilient farms.” – Carol Gribnau, HIVOS
This session presented the joint work of HIVOS and Soil & More on building a climate smart farming system with 90,000 smallholders in East Africa as a case of targeted public investment linked to private sector incentives. Small scale biogas has created new business opportunities for local companies, bioslurry is being used to increase coffee and vegetable production and carbon credits are being brought into the system and sold to brands. Also discussed was the eventual approval of an agricultural protocol for carbon credits with the Gold Standard.
Sean de Cleene from Yara, Andre Eitner from Soil & More and Sjoerd Panhuysen from HIVOS
Additionally there was a lunch season on Financing Climate Smart Agriculture.
HIVOS and Soil&More led an open discussion of key strategies to financing adoption of climate smart agriculture practices. Strategies discussed included carbon market financing to value chain finance coupled with long term lending. IDH shared their proposed forum on financing renovation and rehabilitation in late 2015. Participants included representatives from Ecom, Finlays, Althelia Ecosphere, Sime Darby, AIDEnvironment, ACDI VOCA and IDH.
