Consortium for Scaling-up Climate Smart Agriculture in South Asia (C-SUCSeS) is a four-year joint initiative between South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Agriculture Center (SAC), International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and the SAARC Development Fund (SDF). The program aims to foster partnership and cooperation between SAARC, National Agricultural Research and Extension Systems (NARES), IFPRI, and SAARC governments on the Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) agenda. The project also intends to support agricultural researchers’ to generate and facilitate delivery of technological solutions to smallholder and women farmers, with a specific priority on the intensification and resilience of smallholder agriculture, contributing, inter alia, to increasing water management efficiency, promote innovative, pro-poor approaches and technologies with demonstrated scaling-up potential, strengthen partners’ institutional and policy capacities, enhance policy engagement, and generate and share knowledge.

This publication presents the achievements of the International Alliance on Climate-Smart Agriculture project, which include capacity development, training, information-sharing and several country studies. The project notably contributed to feasibility studies in Botswana, Ecuador and Ethiopia, as well as a case study on Italy that showcased conservation agriculture as a successful approach to overcoming soil fertility loss and erosion in 15 regions. The publication demonstrates how the project has laid the foundations for a strong knowledge community to support climate-smart agriculture (CSA) implementation across countries and regions, thereby contributing to international climate commitments and sustainable development in the field of agriculture and food security. The International Alliance on Climate-Smart Agriculture project was funded by the Ministry of Environment, Land and Sea of Italy (IMELS) and implemented by FAO, in order to advance knowledge-sharing, learning and partnership-building around the CSA approach and to create a Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture (GACSA).

This book discusses various climate smart agro-technologies, their technical and economic feasibility across heterogeneous agro-climatic conditions, assessing farmers’ willingness to adopt those technologies, impact of climate smart technology in agricultural production and possible policy and investment opportunities to upscale it. Containing eight chapters, the book starts with a discussion about the methodological aspects of priority setting of the farm technologies across various regions of South Asia including Eastern Indo-Gangetic plain, Western Indo-Gangetic Plain and arid regions. Using data from field based trials and expert solicitations, the book next deliberates on a list of feasible technologies, assessed by constructing climate smart Feasibility Index. Further on, there is an analysis, using stated preference method, of the behaviour of farmers in adopting climate smart technologies. Preference of women farmers has been given a special focus in this book. After discussing the method priority setting of the farm technologies, impact of climate smart technologies has been analysed using real time data. Government policies have been reviewed with the view of achieving climate smart agriculture in South Asia. The book also describes the optimization modelling framework for investment allocation and technology prioritization. The model integrates both the bio-physical and the economic optimization model to capture the agro-climatic heterogeneity within the region and the variability of technical feasibility across regions and crops. Results of this model will help policy makers to identify how much to invest, where to invest and what technologies to prioritize for investments.

This document reports on the concepts driving the scientific activities of FAO's Mitigation of Climate Change in Agriculture Program's (MICCA) pilot projects in East Africa. It provides results from the research, briefly describes the analytical approaches used and concludes with key messages relevant to discussions on climate-smart agriculture (CSA). The MICCA pilot projects aim to help mainstream CSA in the region by identifying, verifying and scaling up farm management practices that can both increase productivity and set smallholder farmers on a pathway toward emitting fewer greenhouse gases (GHGs) per unit of produce, where possible. As there are many unknowns about what farming approaches are best for reaching CSA's multiple objectives, the underlying premise of the MICCA pilot projects is that strong linkages between science and development are essential to the expansion of CSA in developing countries. The scientific approach that was followed permits a few general messages and suggestions for future efforts on "research to inform policy" that are aimed at quantifying the parameters of potential CSA practices and their implications at nested scales.